Terrible People from History – HeadStuffhttps://www.headstuff.org
Sat, 25 May 2019 10:00:12 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.10Luke Short, Gunfighting Gamblerhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/luke-short-gunfighting-gambler/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/luke-short-gunfighting-gambler/#respondMon, 13 May 2019 11:30:43 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=76507During his lifetime, many men underestimated or ignored Luke Short. He stood less than 5’6” tall and seemed like a natural target for the type of bully that frequented the American “Wild West” period. But those who tried to take advantage of Luke soon learned their mistake, sometimes fatally. Though he was only ever in […]

]]>During his lifetime, many men underestimated or ignored Luke Short. He stood less than 5’6” tall and seemed like a natural target for the type of bully that frequented the American “Wild West” period. But those who tried to take advantage of Luke soon learned their mistake, sometimes fatally. Though he was only ever in a handful of gunfights, he gained a reputation as a deadly man to cross.
A painting of Alameda in Texas, drawn by Hermann Lungkwitz around the time the Short family moved to the state.

Luke Short was born in 1854 in Polk County, Arkansas. He was part of a large family, right in the middle of nine children born to Hetty and Josiah Washington Short. When he was five years old his family moved to Texas, where Josiah purchased a large amount of land relatively cheaply in order to raise cattle there. Part of the reason why the land was so cheap was because this was still “unpacified” territory, and when the local militia headed off to fight in the US Civil War then raids by Native Americans on the ranches became more common. In 1862 the eight-year old Luke saw his father nearly killed in a raid, though his elder brother managed to drive them off with a rifle Luke brought him.

Luke never had any real formal schooling, being expected to work on the ranch from a young age. In 1869 he officially began working as a cowboy, at the age of fifteen. Over the next six years he made several cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, and like a lot of those on these trips he took the opportunity to make some money for himself outside of his wages. He did this both by buying cattle that were included in the drive and by taking trade goods (like cotton) with him on the trip. And it was in the town at the end of that trip, Abilene, where Luke Short first began to make a name for himself as a gambling man.

Luke moved to Kansas for a year in 1873 before returning to Texas. In 1876 he headed to the Black Hills in Nebraska, which at the time was in the middle of a gold rush. Luke didn’t have the temperament for mining but he seems to have found work as a hired gun. There was plenty of work to be had, though whether Luke earned his money defending against bandits or by being a bandit is a matter of debate. There are stories that he was arrested by the army for selling whiskey to Native Americans and escaped, but these seem to be based entirely on a story of dubious veracity written by Bat Masterson over thirty years later. In fact Luke’s main involvement with the army during those years was not being arrested by them, but working for them.

Major Thomas Tipton Thornburgh

In later years Luke was dubbed “the bravest scout in the US Army”, but in fact his military career lasted less than two weeks in October of 1878. He was employed to deliver a message to Major Thomas Tipton Thornburgh, who was tracking down a group of Cheyenne who had gone “off reservation”. His arrival was credited with saving the Major’s company of 500 men, as his own scouts didn’t know the territory and the Major didn’t know he was probably walking into an ambush. Luke stayed with the Major until he had recaptured and re-imprisoned the Cheyenne on the reservation, and then he quit the army having had enough of it to last him a lifetime.

In 1879 Luke made his way to the town of Leadville in Colorado, a mining town where there was a lot of money from silver mining changing hands. Once again Luke had no interest in mining though. He first came to town as a hired gun but soon decided that becoming a professional gambler was more to his taste. “Faro” was the game of choice at the time, rather than poker. (Faro essentially involved drawing through a deck of cards and wagering whether each card would be higher or lower than the first one drawn.) And it was over a game of faro that Luke got into his first recorded gunfight, when another player tried to claim a bet that Luke had placed. The nameless cheat (at least, according to Luke) had some reputation as a gunslinger, but Luke drew faster and shot him in the face. The bullet only wounded him in the cheek, but it was enough to cement Luke Short’s reputation as a man not to be crossed.

There are darker rumours involved with Jim’s time in Leadville, including stories that he robbed some stagecoaches to supplement his income. Whatever he was up to though, Luke left it out of his entry on the 1880 census forms. He recorded his job simply as “clerk”. Shortly after that he returned to Kansas where he was arrested for swindling a man at cards but released without charge. Then in late 1880 he made his way to a town that remains synonymous with stories of the Old West: Tombstone, Arizona.

Wyatt Earp (seated) and Bat Masterson (standing) in 1876.

Tombstone was another silver mining town, and it was where Luke met and made friends with three other professional gamblers; Wyatt Earp, William H Harris, and Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson. Earp, of course, is well-known nowadays for his exploits as a lawman, though most of his reputation is based on a posthumous biography that played fast and loose with the truth. Bat Masterson was prepared to play fast and loose with the truth on his own account; he became a writer in 1902 and wrote stories both of himself and of the gunfighters he had known (including Luke). This of course cemented Bat’s own reputation as a Western legend. Harris is the least famous of the group, though that might be because he was the most successful of them (and so least needed to inflate his reputation).

Harris was one of the manager/owners of the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, and he persuaded his partners to hire his friend Wyatt as a faro dealer. Luke got a job at the Oriental as a “lookout”, keeping an eye out for cheats. (Nowadays this job is called “pit boss”.) Bat Masterson had the same job, which was how the men all met. Another friend of Bat’s was a gambler called Charlie Storms, who was well-known as a gambler and a gunfighter. Charlie was also a drinker, and so when Luke took him to task for his behaviour in the Oriental he didn’t respond well. A lot of the trouble Luke ran into was down to his height; he was only five and half feet tall and slimly built. He didn’t look like a fighter, so men like Charlie Storms assumed they could push him around. Luke Short was not a man to take that type of treatment well, as Charlie found out. Accounts vary how it happened, but the argument ended with the two men in the street in front of the saloon. Charlie was the first to go for his gun, but Luke was the first to fire. Charlie Storms was shot through the heart and died. The coroner cleared Luke on grounds of self defence. And Tombstone learned a lesson: don’t mess with Luke Short.

After the Storms affair Luke decided to leave Tombstone and move to the unofficial capital of the western frontier: Dodge City. He took a job as a faro dealer at the Long Branch Saloon, which was owned by William H Harris. By now Harris was one of the richest men in Dodge City; rich enough to be one of the co-founders of the Bank of Dodge City. Luke did well himself, though not as well as Harris. He prospered enough that when Harris’s partner Chalk Beeson sold his share in the Long Branch then Luke was the one who bought it. This gave him some responsibility, as Harris was about to get busy with politics and run for mayor of Dodge.

The reason for Harris’ sudden interest in politics was down to the man running against him: Lawrence Deger. Larry Deger had been Dodge City’s first marshal and had a reputation for upholding the law despite opposition. At one point he had arrested a friend of the mayor at the time, and the mayor had tried to fire him. Larry responded by charging the mayor with obstruction of justice. It took the city council’s intervention to bring peace between the two, and Larry stayed on as marshal. Unsurprisingly he was running for mayor on a “reform” platform; to clean up Dodge City. Luke and Harris liked Dodge City just as dirty as it was, which was why Harris ran against him. Unfortunately for the two saloon-owners, they lost the election. Larry Deger became mayor in April 1883.

Within weeks of becoming mayor Larry took aim at the Long Branch Saloon. Two ordinances were passed, one for the “suppression of vice and immorality” and another to “define and punish vagrancy”. Based on this three women working at the Long Branch were arrested. Luke claimed they were singers, while the lawmen claimed they were prostitutes. Whatever their profession, it was notable that no other saloon was raided. Also notable was later that evening when Luke met a policeman named Louis Hartman. The two exchanged heated words, followed by hot lead. Neither was injured but Luke was arrested. Five other professional gamblers were swept up in the following days.

Rather than being put on trial, Luke and the other gamblers were simply taken to the train station and ordered to leave town. [1] This extra-legal punishment lends credence to tales of other excesses of Deger’s “vigilance committee”; including threatening a lawyer who tried to represent one of the men with a shotgun and ordering the local correspondents of national newspapers like the Chicago Times not to cover the story. As a result of this Luke had a lot of sympathy in Kansas City, and he also had plenty of friends. One was another former marshall of Dodge, Charlie Basset. Another was William Petillon, a county clerk. Petillon helped Luke present a petition to Governor George Glick. This led the governor to carry out his own investigation, and he wasn’t happy with Deger overstepping his authority. In his eyes it was simply a war between rival saloons where political office was being abused.

In addition to his legal actions, Luke began to gather his friends about him. Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp rallied to their friend’s side, of course. And Wyatt brought his friend Doc Holliday along too, of course. By now the papers were calling this the “Dodge City War”. When Luke returned to Dodge with these friends, people expected shots to start flying. But the governor exerted his influence, as did someone equally powerful: the president of the Santa Fe railroad. With a militia company on hand to enforce the peace, the two sides met and agreed to drop the matter. The following day Luke and his friends posed for one of the most famous photos of the old West, one which has become known as “the Dodge City Peace Commission.”

The “Dodge City Peace Commission”. Standing, from left to right: William H. Harris, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, William F. Petillon. Seated, from left to right: Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp, Frank McLean and Neil Brown.

Despite having settled matters, Luke didn’t really feel welcome in Dodge any more. The old wild days were beginning to fade and Kansas was starting to get more civilised than Luke preferred. He and William Harris began to investigate moving to Texas, and in November of 1883 they sold the Long Branch saloon. Less than six months after he had fought a bloodless war to get back into Dodge City, Luke Short left of his own free will.

Luke’s new home was Fort Worth, a town at the terminus of the railway lines that was the main destination for Texas cattle drives. This made Fort Worth one of the biggest towns in Texas. It was the home of “Hell’s Half-Acre”; twenty-two thousand square feet of saloons, cathouses, hotels and gambling dens. One of the most famous was the White Elephant saloon. It opened originally as a small restaurant in early 1884 and quickly failed. The building was bought by three Jewish businessmen who opened it as a saloon, but the prejudice they faced in the local community made them realise they would never be allowed to make a success of it. So they sold it to a partnership consisting of James A Reddick, Jake Johnson and Luke Short.

The new ownership took over the two adjoining businesses to expand, making the White Elephant one of the largest saloons in Texas. Luke was brought on as a partner because of his knowledge of gambling, and he was given full control over that side of the business. He quickly made the White Elephant one of the most respectable gambling establishments in the city. Of course, gambling was illegal in Texas. But like most establishments the White Elephant simply paid its annual fine as if it was a license fee, and no further action was ever taken.

Luke in a dapper outfit, suitable for the racecourse.

Another partner was Jake Johnson, a former cattleman who now lived off his investments and his stable of prize racehorses. He introduced Luke to turf betting, which led to Luke partnering in a racecourse in Fort Worth. Luke also got into boxing, thanks to his friend Bat Masterson. That led to a bit of a personal disaster, after he was asked to referee a fight between “Kid Bridges and the “St Joe Kid”. Kid Bridges knocked the St Joe Kid out, at which point his second (assuming the match was over) ran into the ring. Since time had not been called this was a foul and technically the St Joe Kid won the match. Tempers were high, and whatever decision Luke made would have been the wrong one. He sided with the St Joe Kid, and was dogged by rumours afterwards that it was a crooked call.

1887 was a significant year in Luke’s life for many different reasons. The first was his brother Henry, who shot and killed a man in the town of San Angelo. Most of Luke’s family lived in the town, and there were suggestions the killing was over a rivalry between two meat markets. Henry fled town after the killing, heading to the only man he knew who could help him: his big brother Luke. Unfortunately Luke was short of cash at the time. (He was also facing serious fines for trying to run a gambling ring at the annual Dallas fair the year before.) So he was forced to sell his share of the White Elephant, though this was intended to be a temporary thing. In fact he was still the gambling manager of the saloon, which was what brought him into conflict with Jim Courtright.

Jim Courtright, during his time as marshal of Fort Worth.

Jim Courtright had been the city marshal of Fort Worth ten years ago, when he gained a reputation for dispensing law right from the barrel of his gun and managed to cut the murder rate of the town by half. He didn’t just kill criminals, though. Rumour had it that several of the “criminals” he killed in “self defence” were business owners who refused to pay their protection money. After he lost the 1879 election he left town and moved to New Mexico, where he was hired by the American Valley Cattle Company. He was one of six men who murdered a pair of ranchers that refused to sell the company their land, after which he fled back to Texas. By 1887 he had returned to Fort Worth, where he was running a “detective agency” and trying to re-establish his old protection racket. Of course, this new “biggest saloon in Texas” was a prime target for a shakedown. Or so he thought.

Jim began doing the rounds of the various saloons, offering to have his agency act as “security” for them in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Some of the smaller ones gave in, but Luke refused. He did offer to pay Jim a flat fee to stay away, but Jim wasn’t willing to do that. Aside from everything else, he knew having his men publicly guarding the White Elephant would boost his protection racket while letting Luke get away with defying him would hurt it. That was what led to Jim standing outside of the White Elephant wearing two pistols and calling for Luke Short to come out.

A modern re-enactment of the gunfight between Luke Short and Jim Courtright.

Jake Johnson was in the saloon at the time, and he was an old friend of Jim. He managed to calm him down before Luke came out. The two men exchanged words, but matters were tense. Suddenly Jim thought that Luke was drawing on him, and went for his gun. Luke claimed that he’d been adjusting his clothes and Jim had made a mistake. Whether that was true or not, Luke was the first to fire. One of his bullets struck Jim in the hand, which might be why he never got a shot off. Another went into Jim’s shoulder. The third struck him in the heart. By the time the local policemen made it to the scene, he was dying and he died soon after.

The inquest was held the next day, and stands as a testament to the problem with eyewitnesses. One said that Luke shot Jim five times, another said four. Neither was consistent with the medical evidence or the number of bullets fired by Luke’s gun. There was evidence given that Jim had told multiple people that he planned to kill Luke Short that night. The only uninvolved eye witness was Jake Johnson, who was friendly with both men, and he backed up Luke’s story that Jim went for his gun first. Based off this the state decided that the case for self-defence was strong enough that they never brought the case to trial.

Luke’s brother Henry also avoided having his case go to trial, though the reason for that isn’t recorded anywhere. Regardless, Luke decided not to buy his stake in the White Elephant back. Jake sold it instead to the Ward brothers, who had already bought Reddick’s stake and Jake’s original stake. With that the original White Elephant company was dissolved. Luke had other things on his mind, anyway. In March of 1887, just over a month after Jim Courtright was shot, Luke headed to the town of Oswego where he got married.

Hattie Short.

Harriet Beatrice “Hattie” Buck was a 23 year old beauty from the town of Emporio in Kansas. Some contemporary accounts described her as “the daughter of a banker”, but her father (who was dead by 1887) had actually been a carpenter. She met Luke under “romantic circumstances”, though the details were not recorded. After the wedding Hattie and Luke made a brief stop in Fort Worth before heading on to Hot Springs, a city in Arkansas. As the name suggests this was a popular health destination, and the fact that the couple stayed there for two months is sometimes taken to mean that Luke was beginning to have health problems.

By the time they left he was apparently recovered though, and after traveling to a few more destinations the couple headed to New York State to attend another wedding. Luke’s old business partner and friend William Harris was also getting married, and after the wedding he took Luke and Hattie to tour the racing circuits of New Jersey and New York. They continued their travels through the summer, and returned home to Fort Worth at in September.

There was trouble waiting for Luke back in Fort Worth, though. He was still the gambling manager at the White Elephant, but he had aroused resentment among the other gambling houses by switching from Faro to a newer game called Keno. (Keno is a game like a cross between bingo and a lottery, where players mark numbers on a card and then win based on how many of those numbers are drawn.) The game cut the faro dealers out of the equation, which didn’t sit well with them. The reformer Sheriff also tried to ban it. It seemed like in Dodge City, the writing was on the wall for Fort Worth as a wild town.

A picture of Luke, date unknown.

Luke was unhappy when the owners of the White Elephant decided to close down their gambling operation rather than continue to face the legal heat, and on December 12th he got drunk and angry. Angry enough to pull a pistol out of his pocket and fire it at the floor. That got him arrested and up on charges for carrying a gun. Luke’s defense was that he had received multiple letters threatening his life for running a keno game, which got him cleared on appeal. After that he decided it was probably time to get out of the saloon business.

In 1889 Luke Short started spending more time north, in the city of Chicago. He still owned a house in Texas and none in Chicago, but the Leland Hotel became his home away from home. He was a “silent partner” in several business ventures, but publicly his main concern was horse racing. He tried to break into the boxing promotion game, setting up a fight back in Fort Worth, but then one of his fighters was arrested. He’d been participating in a “take on all comers” challenge in Dallas and had accidentally killed one of his opponents. Though he was acquitted, it derailed Luke’s plans to the extent that he never managed to arrange the heavyweight championship fight he wanted.

During this time Luke took a trip with Jake Johnson to visit a stud farm in Tennessee. While they were there they took a trip to Memphis to play some cards in the gambling houses with a few friends. Luke and company won big, and walked away with several thousand dollars. Charles Wright was given the money to look after, but didn’t bother putting it in the hotel safe. Naturally he was robbed of every cent. The other gamblers blamed him for the loss and he was forced by a court to pay them back the missing money. Given how much Wright hated him after this it seems likely that Luke was the one who insisted he pay the money.

A picture alleged to be of Luke, date and location unknown.

Wright definitely seems to have harbored a grudge out of proportion to the incident. He was arrested in Fort Worth for threatening one of the other players (a man named Bud Fagg) with a pistol. Luke was more concerned with his boxing promotions though. There was a chance that boxing might be outlawed in California, which would drive the sport mainly into Texas and give Luke a shot at arranging the big title fight he’d always wanted to run. He’d never get that break, though.

Exactly what went on between Luke Short and Charles Wright over the course of 1890 isn’t clear, but by the 23rd of December matters had clearly reached breaking point. Around half past nine Luke arrived at the Bank Saloon in Fort Worth, which was run by Charles Wright. He grabbed a waiter and used him as a human shield when he burst into the gambling room with his pistol drawn. When he ordered all the gamblers to leave they obeyed, and he let the waiter go with them.

“Hell’s Half Acre” in Fort Worth, the site of many of Luke’s exploits.

Charles Wright was in a storeroom down the hall, and as Luke headed towards it a friend of his named Louis de Mouche came up the stairs and asked him to leave off before he was hurt. Before Luke could answer Charles Wright stuck a hand holding a pistol out of his door and fired. He missed, but Luke didn’t. He struck Charles in the wrist and moved to take advantage of it. As he went down the corridor Charles fired a shotgun through the door. Alternatively, the shotgun blast came first and Luke fired after he was struck. Either way, Luke was badly injured and fled the scene.

The police arrived while Luke was being treated. He’d been injured in the left leg and hand. His thumb was gone, and two of his fingers were likely to follow it. The muscles on his leg were also badly injured. Wright was found back at the scene, and taken to a different doctor for treatment. He was well enough to be taken down to the county jail. Luke was too badly injured and was guarded at the doctor. Both men were bailed for $1,000.

Luke was bedbound for months, as his injuries were severe. In part this was also due to ongoing health problems, as he’d been suffering from fatigue for the last few years. Still, papers reported his wound as “near-fatal”, and in that pre-antibiotic age if he had got an infection they probably would have been. He was well enough by May to head north to Chicago for the races. There he was a subject of curiosity as the famed Western gunslinger, with tall tales aplenty about his proficiency with a pistol.

Luke didn’t match the tales in appearance, though, which once again nearly had fatal consequences. A man named Singleton got into an argument over a girl and lost, then decided that the short guy at the hotel bar was someone he could insult to make himself feel better. Luke knocked him down, kicked him several times and then threw him out into the street. Then he went upstairs to get his gun in case Singleton came back. As he was descending the stairs a comedian named William Hoey, who had the same cut of beard as Singleton, was coming in the door. Luke charged the man but a brave hotel clerk managed to get in the way and explain. Luke apologised and the two men retired back to the bar, where the comedian forgave him over a few drinks.

Luke’s trial for the attempted murder of Charles Wright took place over a year after the incident, on the memorable date of February 29th 1892. Though Luke had been the one to incite the incident, there was no proof that he had fired before he was hit by the shotgun blast. (The prosecution claimed he had, but could not prove it.) As a result he was convicted only of “aggravated assault”, and fined $150. Wright’s court case had a similar conclusion.

By the beginning of 1893 it was becoming more clear to everyone that Luke Short was seriously ill. The doctors of the day diagnosed him with “Bright’s Disease”, which isn’t actually a disease. It was how the 19th century categorised the effects of kidney failure. We don’t know why Luke’s kidneys were failing, but it was the beginning of an inevitable end. High blood pressure was one of the symptoms, which the doctors tried to treat with blood-letting. That simply weakened him, of course. In September he and Hattie went on a trip to Geuda Springs in Kansas hoping that the waters might effect a miracle cure. They did not. Luke died on the eighth of September at the age of 39.

The Texas newspapers covered Luke’s death, but its unspectacular nature meant that it was largely ignored by papers outside the state. Unlike many of his contemporaries he never really became a “legend of the West”. The closest he came was as the cause of the “Dodge City War”, and even then that was only because of the the involvement of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. In fact his only TV show portrayals come in episodes of shows about the two more famous men. If he had lived, perhaps he would have found a way to turn his reputation into fame just as Bat did. As it is, he’s faded away into relative obscurity.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/luke-short-gunfighting-gambler/feed/0Catherine Monvoisin and the Affair of the Poisonshttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/catherine-monvoisin-affair-poisons/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/catherine-monvoisin-affair-poisons/#respondTue, 30 Apr 2019 11:30:03 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=75990Nothing makes history trickier to investigate than the whiff of scandal. Coverups and spin aren’t modern inventions, and when it makes every source you have unreliable then getting to the truth of the matter becomes all but impossible. So in today’s article all we can do is to report both the rumours and the official […]

]]>Nothing makes history trickier to investigate than the whiff of scandal. Coverups and spin aren’t modern inventions, and when it makes every source you have unreliable then getting to the truth of the matter becomes all but impossible. So in today’s article all we can do is to report both the rumours and the official version; and let you draw your own conclusions about Madame Monvoisin and the Affair of the Poisons.
The Pont Neuf in Paris in the 1660s.

Catherine Monvoisin’s early days are sparsely documented, but we know she was born around 1640 and probably in Paris. Her maiden name was Catherine Deshayes, and her family were poor. From an early age she was fascinated with fortune-telling, learning palmistry at the age of nine. She had a talent for “cold reading”, the ability to read somebody’s cues as she told their fortune and convince them that she knew things that she could not normally have known.

Catherine was married in her teens to a jeweler named Antoine Monvoisin, and they would go on to have at least three children. Their eldest was a daughter named Marguerite who was born in 1658. Unfortunately Antoine’s business failed, and the family fell on hard times. In order to support them Catherine drew on her childhood interests and lifelong hobby, and began telling fortunes for money.

Catherine’s main form of fortune-telling was reading palms, sometimes called chiromancy. This was considered a “pagan superstition” by the Catholic Church, but many people at the time believed there was a science behind it. It provided the ideal ground for her to use her cold reading skills, and she soon became very successful. As a professional alias (and a pun on her name) she adopted the friendly title of “The Neighbour”; or in French La Voisin.

As with all such female fortunetellers, Catherine found that she was often visited by women with the problem of an illegitimate child on the way. Abortion was illegal in France at the time, of course, leaving women no option but to turn to shady characters like Catherine for assistance. Sometimes she gave them an abortion, sometimes she would deliver the child for them and then have it secretly adopted or otherwise dealt with. Either way, her utter discretion in these matters was probably a major factor in how she began to get more and more high-profile clients, including several from the nobility.

A rich lady visiting a fortune teller. Painting by Jakob Samuel Beck.

In the mid 1660s Catherine had become famous enough as a fortune teller that she was challenged by a priest over them. Rather than back down, Catherine chose to defend herself before the professors at the Sorbonne theological college. This college was well known for challenging “heretical” views (mostly Protestantism), but Catherine showed her mettle before them. She was an intelligent woman, far from what they had expected. Her spirited defence of the “science” behind her palm reading and her affirmation that any spiritual powers she possessed were gifts from God was enough to convince them to let her go. They were satisfied that she was not a heretic. But they were wrong.

By this time Catherine had graduating from telling fortunes to offering her clients a way to change those fortunes. This started out benignly enough; telling them to pray to a certain saint for assistance or similar. However as Catherine became more involved with the “occult community” of Paris (most notably “Adam Lesage”, a self-professed magician) this began to change. Another common problem among her visitors was the desire for someone to fall in love with them, and Catherine began selling magic charms and special powders to aid them in this. In 1667 she was asked to do this on a major scale. Someone wanted her to help them become the lover of the King.

Madame Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan being handed a bow and arrow by Cupid to win the King’s love. Painted by Pierre Mignard.

The “someone” was Marquise Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan, though it was her companion Claude des Oeillets (a former actress) who approached La Voisin. The king was Louis XIV, the “Sun King” who had risen from a child who was used as a puppet monarch to become the first truly absolute ruler in French history. He was one of the most powerful men in the world, and to become his mistress there was nothing Madame de Montespan wouldn’t do. Even if it meant literally selling her soul to Satan himself.

The first ceremony for Francoise took place in Catherine’s house. An abbot named Mariotte presided, with Lesage and Catherine assisting. After prayers to Satan, a drug was prepared and given to Madame de Montespan to use on the king. Whether it gave her the confidence she needed to win him or whether it did contain some aphrodisiac ingredients, in a short time Francoise was the king’s new mistress. This success boosted La Voisin to new heights. Soon she had escalated into producing full Black Masses for her clients in order to win them lovers and marriages, among other things.

The best account of one of these “masses” comes from 1673, when Madame de Montespan returned. The king’s affections were wavering, and she had decided a Satanic boost was needed. According to Étienne Guibourg, the priest who performed the ceremony, they laid a black cloth on an altar. Francoise then lay down on it, face up and completely naked. (According to some accounts she forced her maid Claude to do this instead.) As the priest intoned a blasphemous version of the liturgy, an infant was brought to the altar. The priest laid the chalice on the naked woman’s belly. Catherine then cut the infant’s throat and let it pour into the chalice, spilling out onto the woman’s body. She threw the body into a nearby furnace as the priest raised the chalice and completed the ritual.

An 1895 engraving by Henry de Malvost showing the Black Mass being celebrated on Madame de Montespan.

Whether this was a genuine human sacrifice or just clever stage managing in a dark candle-lit room is hard to tell. Catherine’s daughter later testified that she bought pigeons for her mother and saw her cut their throats and collect the blood. She also said that the “altar” was simply a mattress on some chairs, with stools to the side for the candles. On the other hand at least one of the priests involved seems to have believed there was power involved and tried to use a Black Mass to prevent a friend’s mistress from conceiving. (It didn’t work.)

By the 1670s La Voisin had branched out into another line of work: poisoning. Her knowledge of chemistry, network of clients and reputation for discretion gave her the perfect alley for distribution of this type of substance. Soon she was at the centre of a network of distributors, a sisterhood of fortune tellers and backroom medics with a lethal sideline. Though their noble clients got the highest profile, they most commonly sold their poison to women trapped in abusive marriages who would find no relief from the legal system.

The poison they were distributing is unknown, but it’s likely to have been similar to one known as “Aqua Tofana”. This was a recipe that had been developed by an Italian woman named Giulia Tofana thirty or forty years earlier. The primary ingredient was arsenic, which was such a common poison that it was sometimes called “inheritance powder”. The gradual sickness it caused was perfect for allaying suspicions and for allowing the poisoner to manage the time of death. Other ingredients included belladonna and lead, resulting in a tasteless poison that looked like simple water and left the doctors of the time none the wiser.

Claude des Oeillets, Madame de Montespan’s friend and another of Louis’ “conquests”.

Marital fidelity seems to have been in short supply in 17th century France. The king, of course, usually had multiple mistresses competing (sometimes murderously) for his affections. He treated them all with a shocking callousness, casting them aside at a whim and bedding anyone who caught his eye. (Claude, for example, had a daughter who was almost certainly the king’s child.) The marriage of the Monvoisins was equally unfaithful; Catherine had at least six lovers including her assistant Adam Lesage. Adam once tried to convince Catherine to poison her husband to get him out of the way, but Catherine decided against it.

It was the poisons that would lead to La Voisin’s downfall, through a path that began with a man who died in an accident in 1672. The dead man was Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, an officer in the French army. In 1663 Godin had an affair with another man’s wife, Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers. Her father found out about the affair and had Godin imprisoned using a “lettre de cachet”. This was a French legal device where the king could order anyone imprisoned indefinitely without trial, something which nobles like Marie’s father could petition for him to do. Justice, under the French monarchy, was strictly optional when it came to punishment.

In prison Godin became friendly with an Italian alchemist named Exili. Exili taught the eager Godin about alchemy, including how it could be used to create poisons. When Godin was set free, he passed this knowledge on to Marie and soon they took their revenge on her father. His death was followed by that of her two brothers, which left her free to inherit the family fortune. (She later said that the real motive for killing her brothers was that they had sexually abused her when she was a child.) With her effectively separated from her husband, the two lovers were free to enjoy their lives together.

Marie de Brinvilliers.

Unfortunately for Marie, Godin was paranoid. Afraid that she might poison him as well, he left a full sealed confession among his papers. It was labeled “to be opened if I die before Madame de Brinvilliers”. Since he died in debt his effects were seized by his creditors, who opened the confession and read it. Marie managed to escape arrest and fled to London, then moved to the Netherlands before settling in Belgium. There she was tricked, kidnapped and illegally extradited back to France for trial. In July of 1676 she was tortured into confessing, and on the strength of that confession she was executed.

Whether Marie was actually guilty or not is sometimes debated. The sole evidence against her was the word of a dead man and a confession tortured out of her. What is true is that her conviction, and the idea that three aristocrats had been murdered without anyone realising, was enough to set off a panic among the upper classes. When a fortune teller named Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested for forging a will, she tried to bargain for her freedom by claiming that she had information about crimes of “national importance”. Though she didn’t have any tangible information to share, her testimony was what began the official investigation that became known as la Chambre Ardente – the Burning Court. [1]

Over the next couple of years, the Court (led by Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie) swept up alchemists, fortune tellers and others on the fringes of society who could be suspected of using poison. One of these was Louis de Vanens, who was suspected of selling poison that was used to murder the Duke of Savoy (one of the highest noblemen in the land). Though they became convinced there was a secret organisation to these poison-sellers, they had no luck in cracking it open. Then in 1679 they hit the jackpot when they arrested a poisoner named Marie Bosse.

Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie, organiser of the Burning Court and founder of the first real police force in European history. Painting by Nicolas Mignard.

Marie was arrested after she got drunk at a party and started boasting that she had become so rich by selling poisons to the aristocracy that she would soon be able to retire. One of the guests informed on her to the police, who set up a sting to buy poison from her. Once they had verified the deadliness of what she sold them, they swooped in and arrested her. (Allegedly when they arrested her she was in the middle of incestual relations with her two sons and her daughter.)

Marie was tortured into a confession which gave up the entire organisation of poison sellers in Paris, and which place Catherine Monvoisin right in the centre of it. La Reynie hesitated to arrest her, as he knew that she was connected to some very powerful people at court. He finally arrested her in March of 1679. In doing so he may well have prevented her from carrying out the most high profile poisoning of her career: that of Louis XIV himself.

Madame de Montespan had always said that she would kill the king if he abandoned her, or so it was claimed later. (It’s worth noting that this plot is the sketchiest part of some very sketchy history, and it may be that none of this is true at all.) At the time it looked like he might be about to set her aside and replace her with a young girl named Angelique de Scorailles. (Angelique did die the following year, possibly due to complications from childbirth or pneumonia. Of course, rumours said she was poisoned.) The alleged plot of Catherine and her accomplices was to present a petition to the king which had been treated with a contact poison. Her initial attempt was foiled because there were too many other petitioners for the poisoned one to be presented directly to the king. She was allegedly on her way to plan a new attempt when she was arrested.

This 1680 drawing by Antoine Coypel of a demon holding a mirror for Catherine is the only contemporary picture of her that exists.

Initially Catherine tried to defend herself by claiming that Marie Bosse had made the accusations against her in order to save her own skin by denouncing a rival. (This was undercut in May of 1679, two months after Catherine was arrested, when Marie and her children were all executed.) Catherine’s maid Margot, who had also been arrested, warned the investigators that they were playing with fire. The arrest of Catherine Monvoisin, she said, would impact on people “at all levels of society”. That convinced La Reynie to tread carefully, though he was quick enough to scoop up all of Catherine’s associates. Then he started figuring out exactly what he had.

Though an authorisation was issued to torture Catherine for information, it never seems to have actually been used. Perhaps La Reynie was worried about what she might say; or he was aware of how unreliable information gained that way could be. Instead he took advantage of Catherine’s functional alcoholism and had his interrogators make sure she was permanently inebriated. It paid off; initially she stuck to her story that she had sent anyone trying to buy poison to Marie Bosse but soon she was naming names. The first people she named were minor nobles who received minor sentences; something which began leading people to denounce the court as a farce. In response Louis XIV declared in December of 1679 that the investigators should spare nobody, regardless of rank. It was a declaration he would regret.

Catherine Monvoisin went on trial in February of 1880. It was a very short trial, even given the amount of evidence against her. After the inevitable guilty verdict, a warrant was issued that she should be tortured to produce a confirmatory confession before the death sentence was carried out. However though the official records say that this was done, accounts at the time say that the order was ignored. The authorities were still doing their best to keep Madame de Montespan’s name out of these events, and had no wish to provoke an indiscreet confession.

“The Execution of Catherine Deshayes”, colourised version of an old woodcut. Source

Catherine was executed less than a week after her trial, burned alive in the Place de Grève. She did not go quietly to meet her fate. The night before she persuaded her guards to let her drink her fill and eat a hearty last meal, and it’s possible that as she was dressed in white and taken to her execution she was still quite tipsy. A priest tried to persuade her to confess, but she violently repulsed him. At the execution ground she had to be dragged, fighting every step of the way, to the stake. As the fire was lit she did her best to kick the burning straw away from herself, but it was all in vain. Soon the fires flared up, and when it died down she was dead.

The death of Catherine did not bring an end to the investigation of the poisoning ring, of course. In fact it seems to have intensified it. In part this was due to her daughter Marguerite, who seems to have realised that she would have to work hard to avoid following her mother to the scaffold. She and her brothers (who were living with their father) had initially not been arrested, but shortly before her mother’s trial the authorities had swept them up. This might have been part of the attempt to wrap up the investigation. If so, it failed. The arrest of Marguerite was about to begin a new and even darker phase of the affair.

Marguerite’s confession soon began to paint a picture that was even darker than the Burning Court had expected. The tale of black masses and human sacrifices that unfolded shocked them, but it also seems to have convinced them that Marguerite had played no part in the affair. Those she named (Francoise Filastre, Adam Lesage and Etienne Guiborg among them) were soon confirming the story.

Louis XIV. Louis the Great. The Sun King. The true villain of the piece.

As soon as Madame de Montespan’s name entered the picture, matters took a different turn. It was one thing that she might have used magic to ensnare the king’s interest, but the idea that she had tried to have the Queen to be set aside and for her to marry the king was unthinkable. But she was the mother of recognised and legitimised royal children, and for that reason alone she could not be caught up in this. In addition she was far from the only noble implicated. Olympia Mancini, the head of the queen’s household and the most senior female non-Royal at court was the most notable of those implicated. With such explosive accusations being leveled, it soon became clear that Louis’ declaration of disregard for rank was just empty words.

Instead, the Poison Case Investigation became the Poison Case Coverup. The records of the trial were burned (though the interrogation records from the Bastille survived and allow historians to reconstruct the events). Those who could be safely executed on other charges (like Francoise Filastre) were put to death, but it was decided that none of the others could be allowed to go free. Instead Louis issued a great number of the infamous lettres de cachet. Anyone even slightly implicated was to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives.

That included Marguerite Monvoisin, even though the investigators concluded that she was innocent of wrongdoing. Minor details like that barely mattered in the court of the Sun King. She was imprisoned on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany, along with Margot the maidservant and Catherine Trianon among others. They were guarded only by women (to prevent them from seducing their jailers and escaping) but they were otherwise permitted to live under house arrest in the Palace Royal on the island. Catherine Trianon committed suicide in 1681, but the fate of the others (along with the men perpetually imprisoned, like Adam and Etienne) is unknown. When the king of France sought to make you disappear, you disappeared.

Anna Brewster as Madame de Montespan and Suzanne Clement as Madame Agathe (a character based on Catherine) in the BBC show “Versailles”. Source

As for those he could not make disappear, the Affair of the Poisons still marked a permanent downturn in their fortunes. Francoise de Montespan fell from the king’s favour, of course, but he still had to pay visits to her in order to maintain the pretence of a relationship and to “disprove” the rumours. Ten years later she was finally sent to retire to a convent, though her children were all given marriages and dowries suitable for royal princesses. Several other nobles, such as Olympia Mancini, were forced to flee the country. Her son Eugene was rejected from the French army because of this; he emigrated to Austria where he became possibly the single greatest general of 17th century Europe. In fact his military genius is often credited with preventing Louis XIV from achieving control of Europe in the decades that followed.

The Affair of the Poisons soon entered into popular French folklore as an example of the perfidy and perversity of the upper classes, along with their tendency to protect their own. Louis XIV sought to suppress the truth; but he didn’t realise that in doing so he was creating more fertile ground for the legend It became part of the history fueled a growing discontent among the people of France that would explode into revolution a century later. In the years since it has become the subject of novels, plays and films. La Voisin, it seems, refuses to be forgotten.

[1] The original Chambre Ardente was a nickname of the special court used at one time to prosecute heretics. Though it had been suspended over a century earlier, it was this legislation that was used to establish the new Burning Court.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/catherine-monvoisin-affair-poisons/feed/0Eugène François Vidocq, French Criminal turned Detectivehttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/eugene-francois-vidocq-french-criminal-detective/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/eugene-francois-vidocq-french-criminal-detective/#respondMon, 15 Apr 2019 11:30:43 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=75479The genius of Eugène François Vidocq lay in one simple principle. In order to catch a criminal, you had to be able think like a criminal. And in his case that was easy, because he was one. He’s sometimes referred to as “the French Jonathan Wild”, but that’s hardly fair. Vidocq was smart enough to […]

]]>The genius of Eugène François Vidocq lay in one simple principle. In order to catch a criminal, you had to be able think like a criminal. And in his case that was easy, because he was one. He’s sometimes referred to as “the French Jonathan Wild”, but that’s hardly fair. Vidocq was smart enough to realise that his profit lay in staying on the right side of the law. And in doing so, he revolutionised how we think of policing.

Eugène François Vidocq, known for most of his life simply as “Vidocq”, was born in the French city of Arras in July of 1775. His father Nicolas-Francois-Joseph was a confirmed member of the bourgeoisie, owning both a bakery and a general store. The 1770s and 1780s were a time of serious economic troubles in France, but Vidocq senior managed to turn a tidy profit dealing in corn. This was enough to give Vidocq the chance of a good education, not that he would take much advantage of it.

Vidocq was a ne’er-do-well teenager, constantly getting into fights and always looking for money to spend carousing with the soldiers from the local garrison. When his father restricted their allowance, both he and his elder brother Francois began stealing from the till at the bakery. Francois was caught and sent to apprentice in Lille, while the till was locked. Vidocq responded by stealing the family plate and selling it at a pawnshop. This resulted in his first stay in prison, when his father had him held for two weeks in the hope that it would scare him straight. It didn’t. Instead he burgled his parents shop, stole two thousand francs from the till, and ran away.

Vidocq’s initial plan was to take a ship to America, but that failed when he decided to go drinking with a sailor he met. He woke up the next morning with his money stolen. He thought about signing on to a ship but then discovered there was a circus in town, which he joined. It didn’t go well; he was scared of the animals, failed to master acrobatics, and refused to eat live chickens on stage. The final straw was when he was engaged to assist in a puppet show with the chief puppeteer and his wife, and the puppeteer caught Vidocq kissing the wife during the show. He left the circus in a hurry, and made his way back to Arras.

The Battle of Valmy, one of the major battles Vidocq participated in. Painting by Horace Vernet.

After he had managed to reconcile with his family, young Vidocq decided to enlist in the army. The year was 1791 and the newly born Republic of France was facing down the crowned heads of Europe. Vidocq fit in well in the French army, where he fought fifteen duels in his first six months and earned the nickname of “Reckless”. Some of those duels landed him in the infirmary, but he won most and killed two of his opponents. He fought well enough against the Austrians to be promoted to Corporal, but when he tried to challenge a Sergeant Major to a duel he was instead arrested for insubordination. Rather than stay to face a court-martial (and possible execution), he deserted.

Vidocq didn’t stay deserted long; he and a friend who had deserted with him simply signed up in a different regiment under false names. After he was identified he deserted again, this time crossing the lines and signing up with the Austrians in a French Royalist brigade. When the French announced an amnesty for deserters he left the Austrians and returned to France. After more adventures in the army (including more duels) he was wounded in the leg and in 1793 he was sent home to Arras once more.

Joseph Le Bon, the “representative on mission” who led the Terror in Arras.

It was a different city that Vidocq came back to. There was a guillotine in the town square, and with the Terror in full swing it was kept well-fed with “enemies of the Republic”. Vidocq himself wound up in trouble when he argued with the musician of the local regiment, who had him arrested and denounced him as a Royalist. He was released by the good graces of a local lawyer, and he started a relationship with the lawyer’s sister, Marie-Anne-Louise Chevalier. When she had a pregnancy scare they were married in haste, but they had time to repent at leisure when they found out she wasn’t pregnant. After Vidocq had squandered her dowry and found her in bed with another man they were separated. Though she would later claim that her son (born six years later) was his, in fact they were never reunited and would eventually divorce in 1805.

Vidocq settled in Brussels, which at that time was under French control. He wound up working as a bodyguard for a gang of card-sharks, while his mother sent him money. Unfortunately he was arrested and asked for his identification papers, and as a deserter he had none. He lied about his name (claiming he was called “Roussea”), but foolishly gave his birthplace as Lille. That meant that he was sent back there, and he knew that when he arrived he’d be executed as a deserter. So he escaped and made his way back to Brussels, where his new criminal friends helped him get some forged papers.

Using those papers he wound up joining the so-called armée roulante (”rolling army”), a two thousand-man strong group of conmen who traveled the country under forged orders pretending to be a regular army division and supplying themselves as such. Unfortunately they were victims of their own success, and they had to disband when the real army were sent to deal with them. Vidocq fled to Paris, where he was cheated of all his money. He retreated to his old base of Lille, where he began a relationship with a woman named Francine Longuet. When she cheated on him he beat up her paramour, which led to him being arrested. This was the beginning of his time spent studying in what he later called “the university of crime”: prison.

A French convict of the 18th century.

Vidocq’s first lesson was a harsh one in trust. Two other prisoners asked if they could use his cell for some work that needed peace and quiet. He let them, but then found out he had made himself an accessory to forging a release order. When the forgery was detected, he found himself facing trial on a serious charge. He tried to escape several times, but was recaptured and re-imprisoned each time. In this he was helped by Francine, until he made the mistake of cheating on her when he met an ex-girlfriend. She stabbed herself and framed him for attempted murder, though she later retracted the charge. The next time he escaped he fled the city and made his way to the coast. Once again he thought of traveling to America, and once again he couldn’t afford it. So he signed up with a gang of smugglers instead.

Smuggling turned out to be a bit too hot for Vidocq’s taste, so he decided to reunite with Francine and head to Holland. When he went to meet her in Lille he was recognized and arrested again. His next escape resulted in Francine being arrested for helping him. He managed several more escapes on his own, but still kept getting recaptured. Eventually he went to trial for forgery and was convicted. He was sentenced to eight years of service as a rowing slave on a galley. He decided not to appeal, because he thought that his best chance at a proper escape was while he was being transported to the galley.

In February of 1798 after almost three years in prison he finally succeeded in escaping. Though he was picked up for not having papers a few days later, he was not recognised and easily managed to escape (dressed, somewhat improbably, as a nun). He eventually did manage to get to Holland, where he was unfortunate enough to get press-ganged on to a Dutch military ship. He was eventually traded back to the French, but this was getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. He was sent back to prison with three years added to his sentence. Clearly this was intolerable so in March of 1800 he escaped again.

“Vidocq fleeing gendarmes”, a drawing from his memoirs by George Cruikshank.

While on the run a gang of burglars asked Vidocq to join them, and when he refused they informed on him to the police and he was arrested. Vidocq decided turnabout was fair play, so he wrote to Napoleon’s chief of police in Lyon (where he was) and offered to inform on them. Since two of the gang were wanted for multiple murders, the chief wanted them. But he didn’t know if he could trust Vidocq. In order to prove his loyalty, Vidocq escaped and then immediately surrendered himself. That convinced the chief, so he was sent out to spy on the gang. Once he knew their next job was going to be the one that the police moved on he contrived to get himself re-arrested so that he could avoid being suspected of betraying them.

Based on this and some other services Vidocq was given a safe conduct to go to Paris, which he immediately broke and headed to Arras instead. He spent two years there before he had to escape to Versailles. In Versailles he was eventually betrayed and arrested, at which point he received two unwelcome surprises. The first was a petition of divorce from Marie-Anne-Louise, while the second was the news that his escapes and escapades had finally resulted in him getting a death sentence. He filed an appeal, but decided not to wait for the results. Instead he escaped again by diving through a window and out to the river below.

Convicts chained together at the neck, being marched from Paris to the galley prison at Toulon.

The escaped Vidocq headed to Paris, where he had a moment of revelation when he saw an old friend being guillotined. As a result he did his best to avoid criminality, but he was constantly walking a tightrope and forced to pay off any of his old acquaintances he ran into. He tried to turn informant again, but had little to offer. Eventually he was arrested, and at this point the police agreed to take him on as an informer. He was a prison celebrity for his multiple escapes, but he also had a death sentence hanging over him. So he had no choice but to cooperate, and doublecross men who would have killed him instantly if they found out.

Vidocq being accepted as an informant was dependent on a report being submitted to the Minister of Police, Joseph Fouche that he was not a murderer. Once that had been processed, he proceeded to rat out dozens of his fellow convicts who were in under false names for their true crimes. After 21 months of this perilous trade, he was released. Though of course his release was disguised as an escape, and of course he still had to keep working for the police if he wanted to remain free. So in 1811 the criminal Vidocq officially (though secretly) became a member of the police force.

It was secret partially to protect Vidocq from blowback and partially because of the new nature of his work. The French police used spies extensively, but Vidocq’s great innovation was to organise and professionalise them. He persuaded the powers that be to let him found La Brigade de Sûreté (”The Security Brigade”), a plain-clothes branch of the police who were allowed to operate across the entire city. Since most police forces were confined to specific jurisdiction, it was this and not their origin as spies that came to define La Sûreté. Eventually they would transform into La Sûreté Nationalle, with authority over the whole of France.

Vidocq himself took part in the spying for a while, but as his successes increased and his stature within the police force grew he gradually began to take a backseat. He eventually burned his cover in spectacular fashion with a raid on a cabaret in the suburb of Courtille where he made everyone march out in single file and marked all those he knew to be wanted with a chalk cross. Thirty-eight men were arrested, and Vidocq was exposed as a police spy. When he went to the prison and was berated for this, he reminded his accusers that they were equally happy to betray each other every chance they got. Over time he rebuilt his reputation with them, and eventually he became known as a policeman who was willing to give a criminal a chance.

In fact the Sûreté was staffed almost exclusively with criminals, something which horrified the “old guard” policemen and made Vidocq many enemies. This did serve the function of isolating him from “the establishment”, which meant that he was unaffected by the turmoil caused in 1814 when Napoleon was deposed, returned from exile, and was deposed again. In fact the intrigues of first Royalists and then anti-Royalists produced plenty of work for Vidocq and his Sûreté. This service was recognised in 1817 when he finally received a pardon from the King for his past crimes.

In 1820 Vidocq married for the second time. His bride’s name was Jeanne-Victoire Guerin, and various rumours paint her as either a rich widow he married for her money (though he was quite rich himself by now) or a high-class courtesan (which was probably just slander). She settled into a household with Vidocq, his mother (who had stood by him through thick and thin), and his twenty-seven year old cousin Fleuride-Albertine Maniez.

Vidocq had many more successes over the next few years, some within Paris and some outside. The countryside of France was home to roving gangs of criminals known as Chaffeurs, which means “Heaters”. They were called this because they would break into houses and then hold the resident’s feet in the fireplace until the location of any valuables was revealed. One notorious gang was led by a 72 year old woman called Prudence Pezé, better known as “the Wolf of Rainecourt”. In order to take them down Vidocq had to infiltrate them, join them on three raids, and suggest the perfect target: an old rich man who lived alone. It was a genuine target, but when they attacked it they found it had been transformed into a trap. The gang were killed or captured, and the Wolf of Rainecourt went to Paris to meet Charles-Henri Sanson.

A drawing of Vidocq by Achille Devéria, commissioned for his 1828 memoirs.

1824 was a year of tragedy for Vidocq. His wife died in June, and his mother died in July. Both of these deaths deeply affected him, and his family in Paris was reduced to his cousin Fleuride-Albertine. (She married him six years later in 1830, and was probably his mistress for a long time before that.) 1824 was also a bad year for Vidocq professionally: King Louis XVIII died and was replaced by Charles X. Charles was an ultra-conservative who was not well disposed to former criminals acting as police officers. His rule gave free rein to Vidocq’s enemies to attack him in a thousand needling ways, and eventually in 1827 he handed in his resignation. This left him free to release his memoirs in 1828, which (despite being largely fictionalised) were a huge success. They were a window into a criminal world for the respectable, and did well enough to be translated into English and begin to build the legend of Vidocq.

Vidocq was a rich man when he retired, and he decided to try to do some good (and turn a profit in the process). He set up a paper factory in Saint-Mandé, one of the villages outside Paris that has since been consumed by the city. His plan was to help criminals to reform by employing ex-convicts, who normally found it impossible to find honest work. Of course, this scheme horrified the pious hypocrites of the area who found the idea great in principle, but not if it was going to be in their back yard. The real killer to his scheme were the purchasers of the goods, who refused to pay the market price and demanded a huge discount. In 1831 the expenses drove Vidocq into bankruptcy, and the factory closed.

In Vidocq’s absence from the city the crime rate in Paris had skyrocketed, while the police were more concerned with stifling dissent against King Charles. They failed, and the July Revolution of 1830 had forced him from power. (The monarchy had not fallen again, though. The king had been replaced with his more liberal distant cousin, Louis-Phillipe.) Vidocq’s enemies within the police had also been forced to resign during the turmoil. The stage was set for his return, and after he provided some assistance to the police in a few matters the chief of police was convinced to restore him as head of the Sûreté.

Vidocq’s new appointment didn’t last long. There were a variety of factors at work, but the main one was that as a police official he was a protector of the monarchy. This made him a target for the Republican press, and his past made him a relatively easy one. His successes were minimised, his failures magnified, and his generally dubious tactics were exposed. Vidocq was a believer in “proactive policing”, which often took the form of outright entrapment. His undercover officers committed crimes to maintain their cover, and Vidocq tried to protect them. This then undermined prosecution witnesses in general, which Vidocq was blamed for. In November of 1832 he handed in his resignation again, with the excuse that his wife was ill.

A contemporary print of Vidocq arresting stagecoach robbers, part of his campaign of self-publicity.

Vidocq was out of the police force, but he was well aware that he still had a reputation as a man who got things done. So he founded something new: a private detective agency. The Bureau des Renseignements mainly concerned itself with debt collection and helping victims of swindlers recover their money, with a percentage commission. They employed an office staff and around forty field agents with nicknames like “the Satyr”, “the Cyclops”, “the Man About Town”. The clients (and the commissions) came roaring in, and Vidocq once again became a wealthy man. He even released another book, Les Voleurs (”The Thieves”). It was a non-fiction book about the underworld that was in large part an advertisement for the agency, but the subject matter was compelling enough that it was a huge success.

Vidocq’s primary problem was the police, who had it in for his agency from the start. He was taken to court several times and charged with going beyond the bounds of the law, as were his agents. The first serious blow came in 1837 when the police raided his office over a national security matter. He had taken up money-lending as a sideline, and four War Ministry clerks who had been stealing secrets were debtors of his. Vidocq was arrested and charged with corruption of public officials and “the pretension of public functions”. Three hundred and fifty witnesses were called, and eventually the case was dropped.

The next serious blow came in 1842. Vidocq was careless in investigating a case of fraud. After locating the fraudster (who was named Champaix), he and his agents escorted the man to their office and forced him to sign a declaration of his crime and accepting his debts. Five days later the police raided the offices and arrested Vidocq on charges of false arrest and similar crimes. Vidocq was sent to the Conciergerie, one of the worst of French prisons. Though the damp seriously aggravated his rheumatism, the police refused to move him. They also tried to block his wife from visiting, only giving in after she had made three appeals.

An author’s portrait of Vidocq, by Marie-Gabrielle Coignet.

Vidocq was in prison for months before the trial began in May of 1843. Though it was supposed to be about the fraudster Champaix it soon became an excuse for digging through the general conduct of his agency. Great attention was paid to the issue of the agency “kidnapping young women and placing them in convents”, whether at the behest of outraged parents or cuckolded husbands. Whether there was any truth to it or not, the press loved it. And to the French public, the idea that Vidocq was “an enemy of love” soured many on him. The prosecution argued that Vidocq was “a threat to family life”. The defence argued in vain that the ony real charge was Champaix, and that it had not been proven. Vidocq was found guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Of course, he appealed. The conviction was quashed almost immediately; the appeal court took only minutes to decide that the trial had been mishandled. The damage was done, though. Vidocq did his best to try to win back the public, but over the next few years the number of clients coming to the agency began to decline. The one thing which had allowed them to see off the competition was Vidocq’s reputation, but now that was not enough. Vidocq considered selling his agency, but couldn’t find any buyers who were not obvious fraudsters. So in 1847 the world’s first private detective agency closed its doors. The same year Fleuride-Albertine died of cancer. Vidocq, by now seventy-three years old, never remarried.

An 1845 drawing of Vidocq in the “London Illustrated News”.

In 1848 there was another revolution, which led to the establishment of the second French Republic. Vidocq was employed by the provisional government to deal with the unrest. It was a time of great turmoil, and among the plots Vidocq foiled was a plan to bomb the government. Unfortunately the government were ousted in the elections that December. Vidocq himself stood for election, but did very poorly. The winner of the elections was Charles-Louis Napoleon, the man who would many years later declare himself emperor and end the second republic. Despite the fact that Vidocq had been spying on him months earlier he offered Napoleon his services, but they were declined.

Vidocq went to prison one last time in 1849, this time for impersonating a priest. He had been hired by a duke to try to retrieve some compromising letters from an ex-mistress, but the exchange had gone south and Vidocq had been arrested. He was released without charge, and that was the end of Vidocq’s last involvement with the law. He spent the next eight years in retirement, though he still took on a few private cases. Near the end of his life the son of his first wife tried to make his way into his life, perhaps hoping to inherit something from the estate. Vidocq showed that he was in prison when the man was conceived, and that was the end of that. In fact despite three wives and dozens of mistresses, Vidocq never had any children. Finally in April of 1857 at the age of 81 Vidocq died.

An illustration of Vidocq in “Mysteries of Police and Crime”, by Arthur Griffiths.

The legend of Vidocq began during his lifetime, fueled not only by his own drive for self-publicity but also by his friendship with writers like the novelist Honoré de Balzac who used his stories and personality as the basis for several characters in his books. This was a tradition that would continue, with both of the main characters in “Les Miserables” (the escaped convict Valjean and the policeman Javier) being based on Vidocq at different periods in his lifetime. His friendships in the literary and theatre world meant that plays and stories about Vidocq’s exploits became common. In fact he was the model for the detectives who inspired the Golden Age of detective fiction, Monsieur Lecocq and Auguste Dupin.

Vidocq’s greatest legacy though was his innovation in policework. Though his innovations in criminology are often exaggerated, his creation of a professional force of plainclothes police detectives was soon copied all over the world. Of course his dubious reputation also counted against him and he was sometimes left out of the official rolls of the heads of “La Sûreté”. The uncomfortable truth that it took someone who could think like a criminal to catch the criminals is perhaps the most lasting legacy of Vidocq.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/eugene-francois-vidocq-french-criminal-detective/feed/0Commodus, Roman Emperor and Gladiatorhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/commodus-roman-emperor-gladiator/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/commodus-roman-emperor-gladiator/#respondMon, 01 Apr 2019 11:30:46 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=75072“Who was the worst Roman emperor?” is a commonly asked question, and one which is difficult to answer for many reasons. Not least of those is “worst for whom?” Rome was a slave economy after all, so an emperor good for the city of Rome was likely bad for the people who were conquered and […]

]]>“Who was the worst Roman emperor?” is a commonly asked question, and one which is difficult to answer for many reasons. Not least of those is “worst for whom?” Rome was a slave economy after all, so an emperor good for the city of Rome was likely bad for the people who were conquered and enslaved. Taken as “who was worst for Rome”, though, the answer becomes simpler. Though there were emperors whose reigns had worse consequences for the city, in general those emperors inherited bad situations and made them worse. But no other emperor quite managed to take a Rome at the height of its powers and solely through their mismanagement destroy it quite like Commodus.
Nerva, first of the “good emperors”.

The Rome that Commodus inherited came at the end of the reign of the “Five Good Emperors”. The first of these was Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a longtime civil servant and imperial advisor. Nerva was voted as emperor by the Roman Senate after the assassination of Domitian, and though his reign was short he did much to stabilise the Roman economy. He was also smart enough to know when his reign started to slip, so he appointed Trajan (a popular general) as his successor. Trajan was succeeded by Hadrian, who Trajan’s widow claimed had been adopted by Trajan on his deathbed. This might even have been true.

Hadrian is an example of an emperor who was good for Rome and bad for other people. For example, Jewish records of him generally follow his name with “may his bones be crushed”. Nowadays he is most remembered for building a wall marking the northern boundary of Roman Britain but he was also responsible for many other public works. He was succeeded by Antoninus Pius, who adopted two sons: Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius. When he died they succeeded him as co-Emperors, until eight years into their reign when Lucius died of an uncertain disease. Marcus Aurelius ruled on alone, and became the first of these emperors to have a biological son to succeed him. Which is, of course, where things went wrong.

Lucius Aurelius Commodus and his twin brother Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus were born on the 31st of August in the Roman year 914, nowadays better known as 161 AD. [1] This was only a few months after the the death of Antoninus Pius. His mother Faustina was actually the youngest daughter of Antoninus, and though later histories slandered her as an adultress in truth she and Marcus Aurelius seem to have made a solid match. The had thirteen children, with Titus and Commodus as the tenth and eleventh respectively. But in a sad reflection of child mortality at the time, though Commodus was their seventh son he was the only one who would survive to adulthood.

Commodus as a child.

Titus died when he and Commodus were four years old, and the following year Commodus was officially given the rank of “Caesar”. Originally Augustus had taken Julius Caesar’s cognomen to emphasize his connection to the great man, but it had become the traditional marker that someone was to be considered a member of the Imperial family and so was in line for the succession. Commodus’ younger brother Marcus Annius Verus was also made a Caesar, though he died in 169 AD at the age of seven after an attempt was made to remove a tumour from behind his ear. This left Commodus as sole heir to Marcus Aurelius, who became sole Emperor the same year.

Notoriously, Marcus mourned his dead son for a mere five days. His justification was that the holy games of Jupiter were going on, and it was his sacred duty as Emperor to officiate. In truth, it was very much in character for him to shun a public display of grief. Marcus Aurelius had a reputation as a “philosopher king”, and his philosophy was Stoicism. In fact a lot of our knowledge of this school of philosophy comes from his writings. Self-control and freedom from passion were key to the Stoic way of life. This was the strict worldview that Commodus was raised in.

By 172 AD the eleven year old Commodus was accompanying his father on campaign, along with his mother Faustina. At the time Marcus was leading forces in the north against the German tribes, who always caused trouble on the border. It was in recognition of them being driven back that Commodus was given the title of “Germanicus”, with which Marcus somewhat farcically credited the child with being the reason for the Roman victory. This was part of him attempting to legitimise Commodus as an heir, since for a long time genuine dynastic succession like this had not been a part of the Roman system.

Commodus as a youth in the toga of manhood.

175 AD saw Commodus undergo the Roman rites of manhood and gain the privilege of wearing the garb of a Roman citizen, a toga. He underwent these ceremonies while his father was mobilising the army to put down a revolt in Egypt. Marcus had fallen ill and rumours had spread of his death, leading the governor of Egypt, Avidius Cassius, to rebel. Egypt was a vitally important province as it produced the grain that fed the city of Rome. Marcus thus wasted no time in mobilising to put down this revolt, though as it turned out he needn’t have bothered. Once it became clear he was alive and the revolt had no chance of success Cassius was murdered by his own men, who sent his head to Rome as proof that the revolt was over.

Faustina died in the winter of 175, in a town called Halala in modern day Turkey. Unlike when his son had died, Marcus did grieve deeply for his wife’s death. He renamed Halala as Faustinopolis, and had her deified by the Senate. In the aftermath of her death Marcus took Commodus on a tour of the eastern provinces, which culminated into a visit to Greece where they took part in the secret rites of Demeter known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. (This had become a status symbol for the Greek-obsessed Romans.) Then they returned to Rome.

Over the next few years Marcus did his best to consolidate Commodus as his heir. This included making him a consul in 177, aged only fifteen. At the time he was the youngest person to hold what had been (in the days of the Roman Republic) the supreme position of power of Rome. Now it was simply a tool the Emperor used to show his favour. Following this consulship Marcus made his son co-Emperor. Commodus was also married off to Bruttia Crispina, a fourteen year old heiress of a rich aristocratic Roman family. The two Emperors then set off to the northern front, as the victory celebrations against the Germans had been slightly premature.

A statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback

By now Marcus Aurelius was fifty-eight years old, an advanced age back in those times. As the army traveled through Vindobona (modern Vienna) he fell ill, and he feared (correctly) that this could be the end for him. Herodian of Antioch [2] later wrote that Marcus was nervous, thinking about previous rulers who had gained the throne at a young age and been corrupted by it. He was also afraid that the enemies of Rome would see this as an opportunity to act. So he summoned all of his friends and kinsmen, told them to remember all that he had done for them and asked them in memory of him to act as fathers to his son after he was gone. The next day he died, and Commodus became emperor. It was only the third time in Roman history that a ruler had been succeeded by his biological son, at least since the days of the last king Tarquin the Proud (link!) six hundred years before, and the first time one had been “born to the purple” as the Emperor’s son.

Commodus began his reign by ending the campaign against the Germanic barbarians. This was against strenuous protests from his father’s advisors and generals, who saw it as a betrayal of the twelve years they had spent trying to conquer Germany. On the other hand, the soldiers saw it as a chance to escape from the hellish forests along the Danube, where hordes of barbarians would suddenly ambush them and melt away. They were delighted when (after leading one last sortie against a weak enemy force so he could declare “victory”) Commodus packed them all up and headed back to the comforts of Rome.

Once they had returned to the Eternal City, Commodus began throwing himself into all the pleasures of the flesh that had been denied by his Stoic father. He was uninterested in the details of running the Empire, so that fell to the advisors his father had left him, the Senate, and the Imperial Chamberlain. This last was a Greek man named Saoterus, a former slave who had been a friend of Commodus for years. Some sources insinuate that the two men were lovers, but whether that was true or not he was someone who Commodus trusted enough to run his empire for him.

Lucilla.

Marcus Aurelius had done a good job of clearing out any potential rivals to his son, with the result that Commodus got away with his laissez-faire approach for the first two years of his reign. In fact the first trouble came not from his rival, but from his wife Crispina’s. Lucilla, the elder sister of Commodus, had been the wife of Marcus’ co-emperor Lucius Verus. This had given her the rank of Augusta (or “Empress”), and after Faustina’s death she had been the First Lady of the Empire. Until Commodus became emperor, and his wife became the Augusta.

Lucilla had remarried to a senior senator named Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus, and she began conspiring with a group including the prefect of the Praetorian Guard to have her husband made emperor once Commodus had been removed. (The Praetorian Guard were officially the Emperor’s bodyguard, but in truth they were usually the ones involved in plotting against him.) Part of the plot involved framing Saoterus for the assassination, while they recruited one of Lucilla’s lovers, Quintianus, to do the actual killing. Pompeianus, Lucilla’s husband, was left out of the plot partially to give him clean hands and partially in case he had cold feet.

Of course, the entire plot hinged on Quintianus killing Commodus. He ambushed him from a doorway as the Emperor was returning from the theatre, but he bungled the job. Some sources say that he grandstanded before attacking Commodus and declared “This is a gift from the Senate!” If true, that was a statement that would have serious consequences. However it happened, he was overpowered by the Emperor’s bodyguards, and captured alive. It was a catastrophic failure.

The unfortunate Crispina.

Quintianus was tortured and gave up all the conspirators he knew of, including Lucilla. Most of them were executed. Lucilla, as a noblewoman, was simply forced into exile. (As was traditional, Commodus had her secretly murdered a few years later. Ironically poor Crispina, his wife, would suffer the same fate six years later. Her crime, laid by her constantly unfaithful husband, was “adultery”.) Quintianus didn’t know about the Praetorian involvement, but the prefect (Tarrutenius Paternus) had already murdered Saoterus “resisting arrest” for his part in the conspiracy. Commodus was enraged and had Paternus arrested and executed. He was replaced by his second in command, Tigidius Perennis, who managed to cover up his own involvement in the conspiracy. In fact Perennis ingratiated himself with Commodus enough to take over Saoterus’ position as right hand man to the emperor.

Though Perennis was now Commodus’ trusted steward, he had enough other duties that he did not act as chamberlain for the imperial household. That job went to Marcus Aurelius Cleander, a freedman like Saetorus had been. (”Freedmen”, former slaves, were forbidden from pubic office and so naturally gravitated in to civil service.) Cleander soon gained Commodus’ trust by agreeing to “marry” one of the emperor’s mistresses, though of course this was solely for the sake of appearances. Commodus had no idea that Cleander was one of those who had carried out the murder of his friend Saoterus.

Commodus in a hunting costume, a 19th century drawing of an ancient statue.

The attempt on his life broke Commodus out of his complacency and left him in a dangerously paranoid state. Dangerous, that is, for those around him. Perennis took advantage of this paranoia to direct Commodus in a purge of the senate, a purge that just happened to sweep up both political enemies of Perennis and rich men whose property he was able to confiscate. Commodus was mollified by this, enough that he didn’t notice how Perennis was buttering up the army with gifts and maneuvering his sons into command positions.

The ancient histories are divided on whether Perennis was plotting to overthrow Commodus and Cleander took advantage of it, or if Cleander framed the prefect. The first rumbling came several years after the Lucilla incident, when someone invaded the stage and denounced Perennis. The prefect managed to convince the emperor that this was a lie, and the man was executed. However the following year when some soldiers were reassigned from Britain to Italy they asked for permission to see the emperor. They had been under the command of Perennis’ son in Britain, and they had coins allegedly minted there showing Perennis as emperor. Based on that evidence Commodus ordered Perennis and his entire family executed. This left Cleander effectively in control of the empire.

That was bad news for the empire. Perennis might have been corrupt and scheming, but he had a career of command and was a competent administrator. Cleander was not. He ran the empire as a bandit king, seeking only to extract the maximum amount of profit he could out of it. Public offices had always informally been sold off, but Cleander raised it to an art form. Senatorial positions, governorships, army commands, all could be had for a price. Even the consulship, once the highest rank in Roman society, could be bought. In 190 AD, ten years into the reign of Commodus, there were 25 consuls all of whom had paid for the privilege. In the meantime the infrastructure of the empire was beginning to crumble, and cracks were starting to appear.

A statue of Commodus in gladiator armour.

What was Commodus doing while his empire was falling apart? Playing at being a gladiator, of course. All of Rome was fascinated by the gladiatorial games, where men risked their lives for the screaming crowds. The fact that Commodus loved the games (and generously financed them) was part of why he was so popular among the people of Rome. But thought they loved the games, the Romans in general had little but contempt for the actual gladiators themselves. Perhaps they wouldn’t have been unable to stand the slaughter otherwise. Regardless, it became a national scandal when Commodus decided he didn’t just want to watch the games. He wanted to take part.

Now Commodus did train hard for his role as a gladiator. He had loved sports since he was a child, and he pushed himself into excellent physical shape. However there’s no getting around that he never did really put his life at risk. His opponents were usually weakened and given weapons made of soft lead, no match for the emperor’s steel. They also knew that if they wounded him they would almost certainly be killed, while if they put up a good show but were defeated then the “gracious” emperor would probably spare them. It’s not surprising then that Commodus soon began to think of himself as the greatest gladiator of all time. In the meantime the aristocrats of Rome began spreading rumours that Commodus was not the son of Marcus Aurelius, but that his mother Faustina had conceived him during an affair with a gladiator.

“Pollice Verso” (”Turned Thumb”) by Jean-Leon Gerome. The victorious gladiator is armed as a secutor, just as Commodus would have been.

Not all of his opponents in the arena were gladiators, or even human. Commodus began to think of himself as one of the great mythic heroes, and so he decided that he should fight “monsters”. Sometimes these were exotic animals like giraffes, but all too often they were people who had some “amusing” disability. Dwarfs and people missing limbs (from accident or birth) were a particular favourite. They would be captured on the street or bought as slaves, and then sent into the arena so that Commodus could kill them for sport. This was one of the things that hurt the emperor’s popularity, not because the public found it barbaric but because they found it boring. Sometimes Commodus would also show off his archery skills, and on one notable occasion he decapitated an emu with a single arrow.

Despite all of this Commodus remained very popular with the people of Rome, which is why when there was a food shortage in 190 AD they didn’t blame him for it. They blamed Cleander. This was exactly what the prefect in charge of the grain supply, Papirius Dionysius, had hoped for. He had been prefect of Egypt until the previous year, when Cleander had displaced him in favour of someone who had paid more. When the grain supplies were interrupted, Dionysius should have used the reserves to prevent the people of Rome from starving. He didn’t, they did, and they rioted.

Commodus probably wouldn’t have paid that much attention to the civil unrest in Rome, except that the rioters found the one place that he wouldn’t ignore them – the arena of the Circus Maximus. A protest during a horse race led Commodus to dispatch the Praetorian Guard to pacify the streets. The prefect of Rome, a well-respected general named Pertinax, decided that this was an illegal use of the guard and sent the Vigiles Urbani (the City Watch, a combination of firemen and police) to prevent them from interfering with the rioters. Eventually Commodus decided that it would make his life easier to give them what they wanted. He handed over Cleander, who was promptly murdered. After things had calmed down, Commodus discovered that it was Papirius Dionysius who had fanned the flames and had him executed.

One of the many statues of Commodus-as-Hercules.

Tiring of the failures of his henchmen, Commodus now decided to take a more active role in governing the city. He was sure that he could do a good job of it, because he had now decided that he was a god. Specifically he had decided that he was the god Hercules reborn. In order to showcase this he had statues made showing him with the hero’s iconic lion skin and club – the same club he used to beat cripples and other unfortunates to death in the arena. The statues included the great Colossus of Nero next to the Colosseum, a 30-foot statue of Nero that later emperors had already transformed into the sun god Sol Invictus. Commodus beheaded the unconquered sun and replaced it with his own visage.

Commodus didn’t stop at declaring himself a god, though. By now between his imperial names and self-bestowed titles his full name was Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius. That made twelve names, the same as the number of months in the year. This wasn’t a coincidence, as Commodus officially renamed the months after each of his names. He went even further, though. After Rome was ravaged by a fire in 191 AD and needed extensive rebuilding, he decided it was no longer Rome. Rome was now “Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana”, and its people were now “Commodianus”.

Unsurprisingly this was the point at which Commodus’ popular support began to fade. This was only partially due to the megalomania. It was also due to the economic mismanagement which meant that paying for the much-needed rebuilding work was difficult. Telling Commodus about any of these problems was an easy way to wind up dead, of course. It’s not surprising that plots against soon began, very discreetly, to spring up.

“The Emperor Commodus Leaving the Arena at the Head of the Gladiators”, by Edwin Howland Blashfield. Source

Legend has it that the trigger for the final plot against him was his plan for the New Year’s Day celebration at the end of 192 AD. This was one of the most sacred occasions in the Roman calendar, and his plan was to commemorate it with a procession of gladiators from the Colosseum to the Imperial Palace. He himself would take part in this procession as a gladiator. Commodus told his mistress Marcia about this plan and she was unable to stop herself from crying out against it. Later that day she walked into a scribe carrying messages, and while she was helping him gather them up she noticed her own name on a list of those scheduled for execution. She realised that if she didn’t do something, then she was doomed.

That’s one story of events, at least. Another more likely version is that the Praetorian prefect Quintus Aemilius Laetus and the chamberlain Eclectus formed a conspiracy to eliminate Commodus before they went the way of Perennis and Cleander. They recruited Marcia because of her access to the emperor and made a quiet agreement with the prefect Pertinax, a man well-respected by the Senate, people and army. When the throne was vacant Pertinax would step in with clean hands, and in return he would make sure that no reprisal for the death of Commodus fell on them.

The conspirators struck on New Year’s Eve, the last day of 192 AD. Originally Marcia tried to poison the emperor, but poisoning back then was often a hit and miss affair. Most versions of the story have Commodus feeling ill and forcing himself to vomit, though it’s uncertain whether he knew he was poisoned. Either way he retreated to his bath to try to sober up. Subtlety having failed, the conspirators went to their backup plan. They sent in one of the few people allowed to access the emperor’s bathroom, his personal trainer Narcissus. Narcissus then strangled the emperor to death. The earthly reincarnation of the god Hercules was no more, murdered at 31 years old.

The Death of Commodus, from a history book published in 1900.

Nowadays Commodus is best remembered as the villain of Ridley Scott’s movie “Gladiator”, a sneering and arrogant portrayal by Joaquin Phoenix. The movie is far from historically accurate. Its protagonist, Maximus, is entirely fictitious. Its version of Lucilla might as well be. It has Marcus Aurelius murdered by Commodus for planning to return Rome to being a Republic; something that would have been wildly out of character for the stoic authoritarian. It drastically alters the death of Commodus, of course. But the single biggest lie in the movie is when it implies that the death of Commodus led to a happy ending for Rome. The truth was far from that.

At first, events after the emperor’s death went exactly according to plan. The senate acclaimed Pertinax as emperor, damned the memory of Commodus, and undid all his ambitious renaming. Unfortunately Pertinax miscalculated when he tried to reign in the Praetorian Guard. Having had their prefects effectively running the country several times in the last ten years they had grown use to lax discipline and hefty bribes. When Pertinax failed to come up with enough to satisfy him they murdered him on the steps of the imperial palace.

With Pertinax dead, there was no longer a “natural successor” to Commodus. The Praetorians decided to auction off the throne, and it was bought by a senator named Didius Julianus. Meanwhile three governors in different parts of the empire went into rebellion. This was why 193 AD became known as the Year of the Five Emperors, and it would be years of civil war before one of those governors prevailed and became undisputed emperor.

History has not been kind to Commodus. To be fair, he probably doesn’t deserve kindness. But he also probably doesn’t deserve to be given sole credit for destroying the Roman Empire, as some historians claim. The long-term worst decision he made was probably to abandon the northern campaign, as that left barbarians who would ravage and eventually destroy the Western Empire. But conquering them would merely have exacerbated the other problem that destroyed Rome: that the Empire simply grew too large to live. Controlling it required powerful independent governors, exactly like those who rebelled after the death of Pertinax. But the real reason Commodus should not get that blame for “destroying” Rome is that it would not be until 400 years after his death that the Western Empire finally fell. There are a lot of modern countries that have not been around for half that amount of time. Empires are resilient things, and it takes more than one bad ruler to kill them off; even one so undeniably bad as Commodus.

[1] The “AD” system of years didn’t become common until about six hundred years later, and wasn’t universally adopted in Europe until the 15th century.

[2] Herodian was writing about fifty years later, and his accuracy has been hotly debated over the years. Though he did live through the times he wrote about, like most contemporary writers he did have his own politics that he brought to the table. He’s still one of our best sources for a crucial period in Roman history, of course.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/commodus-roman-emperor-gladiator/feed/0Domhnall Ua Buachalla, Rebel and Last Governor General of Irelandhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/domhnall-ua-buachalla-rebel-and-last-governor-general-of-ireland/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/domhnall-ua-buachalla-rebel-and-last-governor-general-of-ireland/#respondMon, 18 Mar 2019 11:30:05 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=74731They say history belongs to the winners, but that’s only half the story. History also belongs to glory hounds. Those who trumpet their triumphs, those who seek to make sure that they are remembered. As for those who would as soon be forgotten, they often get their wish. Such would probably have been the case […]

]]>They say history belongs to the winners, but that’s only half the story. History also belongs to glory hounds. Those who trumpet their triumphs, those who seek to make sure that they are remembered. As for those who would as soon be forgotten, they often get their wish. Such would probably have been the case for Domhnall Ua Buachalla, except for the minor detail that this life-long Irish Republican and veteran of the Easter Rising was also the last official representative of the British Crown in Ireland.
Maynooth in the 19th century. Source

Domhnall Ua Buachalla was born in Maynooth in 1866. Due to the laws at the time it was effectively illegal to use anything but English for “official purposes” like recorded, so his name was officially registered as “Daniel Richard Buckley”. Since his father Cornelius was a fluent and enthusiastic Irish speaker he was raised with that as his first language, so he always regarded Domhnall as his “real” name. When circumstances forced him to use an English spelling he would always use “Donal”, the phonetic spelling of Domhnall, rather than Daniel.

This complicated linguistic dance reflects the equally complicated state of life in Ireland at the time. Later political opportunists have tried to divide it into a simple “Protestant and Catholic” dynamic, but there was often far more to it than that. Domhnall’s mother Sarah, for example, came from a Protestant Quaker family. Her father Joshua Jacobs became somewhat infamous in 1838 when he was expelled from the Society of Friends for his extreme beliefs. This also led to his estrangement from his first wife (Sarah’s mother). He then founded a sect known as the “White Quakers”. Newspaper reports at the time paint them as somewhat of a cult, but it was their refusal to pay taxes on religious grounds that ran them afoul of the law, along with an allegation that Joshua had stolen the inheritance of a pair of orphans in his care. Joshua eventually wound up marrying a Catholic woman (after Sarah’s mother had died) and converting to Catholicism. He died in Wales in 1877, when his grandson was 11, and it’s unlikely the two ever met.

Young Domhnall grew up in a country dominated by anger, anger towards an unjust system that seemed to be set up to profit from Irish suffering. The “Poor Laws” which had provided some relief from starvation during the Famine twenty years earlier included a clause which made farmers who owned their land give it up before they were considered “poor” enough, meaning that even more land wound up in the hands of the wealthy landlords. A growing movement for land reform dominated the country during the 19th century, with Irish identity and the Irish language becoming thoroughly tangled up in it.

Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill

By the 19th century the traditions of Ireland had been eroded by cultural pressure from Britain (a semi-deliberate policy of “civilising” Ireland), enough that various associations sprung up to try to keep these traditions going. The most famous of these was the Gaelic Athletics Association, which is still active as a major sporting organisation to this day. More interesting to Domhnall was the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde to promote the Irish language. It was not the first such organisation, but it was definitely the most popular. It was officially a non-political movement, but by its nature it brought together those who valued their Irish identity and who thus supported Irish self-rule in one form or another. The 26-year old Domhnall founded the Maynooth branch of the League, and became well-known for teaching Irish classes.

Domhnall had considered joining the Customs and Excise service, but when his father fell ill he took over the family business instead. He would continue to operate the store for the rest of his life. In 1897 he married Jane Walsh, who used the Irish form of her name – Sinead – after that. They honeymooned in Cork, which Dohmnall was profoundly unimpressed by. He wrote to his sister, saying:

Cork is a dirty, sleepy hole compared with Dublin. It looks well when seen from a particular point [of] about a mile or so. But don’t come nearer to it.

In 1905 Domhnall became caught up in a wave sweeping the country of people being prosecuted for having the Irish form of their names written on their delivery carts. The law specified that delivery vehicles had to be labeled “legibly”, and it was the official legal position of the British government that Irish was by its nature “illegible”. The most famous such case was that of Niall Mac Giolla Bhrighde, a farmer, poet, and songwriter from Donegal. He was fined a shilling for his “illegible” name and then another shilling when he refused to pay. The Gaelic League sponsored his appeal to the King’s Court in Dublin where he was defended by Pádraig Pearse. Pearse lost the case, in a verdict which he later described as “…it was in effect decided that Irish was a foreign language.”

Niall Mac Giolla Bhrighde, the most well-known of those prosecuted for using Irish names on their signs.

Domhnall also refused to pay his fine, which resulted in goods from his shop being seized to cover it. There’s a well-known story that the goods were put up for auction, but there was a conspiracy where only one person bid on them. He got them for a pittance and immediately returned them to Domhnall. There’s also a story that Domhnall was also defended by Pearse, but that doesn’t line up with the story that the Niall Mac Giolla Bhrighde case was the only one Pearse ever defended in court. Whether or not Pearse defended Domhnall the two men were definitely friends. They knew each other through the Gaelic League, and Domhnall sent his son Joe to attend Pearse’s Irish-language school. It might even have been Domhnall who recruited Pearse for the Irish Republican Brotherhood – or it might have been the other way round.

The IRB was founded in the aftermath of the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. This was in response to the great wave of revolutions sweeping Europe at the time, though it was largely a dud with there being a single clash between the rebels and the police before it collapsed. The main consequence was that a young man named James Stephens fled Ireland to avoid arrest and settled in Paris. This was a city that had a deep culture of revolution, and here James learned about how to organise a successful secret society. He learned about inductions and oaths, cell structures and counter-intelligence. Armed with this knowledge he founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood. [1]

The IRB came to Ireland in the 1860s, and around the time Domhnall was born his father Cornelius became a member. Fifty years later it was old news, and had largely stagnated. Around 1905 though younger men began to join, and by the time of the outbreak of World War 1 the Brotherhood had renewed itself into a new energised organisation. The previous year they had arranged for the foundation of the “Irish Volunteers”, a response to the Unionist “Ulster Volunteers”. At the time it looked like the inevitable course of history in 1914 was that the British government would pass Home Rule, the Unionists would revolt, and then the British Army would refuse to fight them. The Volunteers were created to fight in their stead. Of course, then the assassination of an Austrian nobleman led to a chain of events that plunged all of Europe into war. Home Rule was no longer a priority.

Of course, by now the Irish Volunteers had got weapons and organisation, even if they didn’t have an impending civil war to worry about. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” became their watchword. Domhnall had organised a Maynooth branch of the Volunteers, making his own bullets for their weapons and leading their secret training drills. His old friend Padraig Pearse was both a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council and the Director of Military Organisation for the Irish Volunteers. He was part of the group who made contact with Roger Casement (link!) (who was trying to recruit German support for an Irish revolution) and arranged for a shipment of guns to be made to arm the Volunteers for a rebellion on Easter Sunday. The weapons were intercepted by the British Navy and never arrived, leaving things in a state of confusion.

On the morning of Easter Sunday the Maynooth Volunteers mustered at Domhnall Ua Buachalla’s hardware store. The 21 men had the job of cutting off the telephone and telegraph lines from Dublin to the military camp at the Curragh in Kildare. They were also to destroy the railway line so that once word did reach the forces there they would be delayed in reaching Dublin. Before they could set out, a message arrived from Eoin MacNeill (the co-founder of the GAA, who was also the official head of the Volunteers) ordering them to stand down. MacNeill did not think they could succeed without Casement’s guns. The men were discussing this when a message sent from Pearse to Domhnall arrived, telling them to disperse and await further orders. He would never have a chance to send those orders.

The following day word reached Maynooth around the afternoon of fighting in Dublin. Domhnall cycled into Dublin, avoiding any trouble from the authorities since they did not think of a fifty year old man as a potential “rebel”. He didn’t manage to contact anyone but when he got back to Maynooth he and the other Volunteers decided to head to Dublin and join the Rising. They made their way to Dublin through Blanchardstown and slept that night in Glasnevin Cemetery.

The next day they reached the GPO, the headquarters of the Easter Rising. They were greeted by James Connolly and Padraig Pearse, who told them of the situation in the city. At Pearse’s request the Maynooth men, led by Domhnall, mounted a sucessful rescue of a group of rebels who had been cut off in City Hall. This was a great boost to the spirits of the men in the GPO. Since Pearse trusted Domhnall and knew that he was a good shot he sent him on several such missions during that fateful week. Domhnall disliked talking about his own exploits, but reports of those who accompanied him say that he killed at least three British soldiers during these missions.

A barricade in Dublin during the Rising.

Ironically if the Maynooth men had fulfilled their original mission on Easter Sunday, it might have helped to delay the end of the Rising. In the end though the British were able to pour troops into the city through the ports and along the railway lines. By Wednesday there were 16,000 troops in the city, outnumbering the rebels fifteen to one. On Saturday the rebel leaders at the GPO surrendered, leading to an end in fighting in the city. Domhnall was one of those captured at this point, but luckily for him he was not identified as a leader in the Rising. As such he was not one of the fifteen leaders who were executed after a swift trial of dubious legality. Instead he was held first in an Irish prison and then in a Welsh internment camp. He was released in December of 1916, thanks in part to public outcry after the executions.

One other outcome of the Rising was the elevation of Sinn Fein as the core party of Irish republicanism. This was due to an odd bit of self-fulfilling rhetoric. Despite the fact that Sinn Fein were a small party with no direct connection to the Rising, they were still blamed for it by a British press that had no interest in understanding the situation. This then meant that supporters and veterans of the Rising flocked to join Sinn Fein, and in fact basically took over the party. Domhnall was one of those supporters, and in 1918 he stood for election in Kildare North as a Sinn Fein MP. (He was reluctant to stand, especially since his wife Sinead had died only a few months earlier, but he decided it was his duty to do so.)

The election of 1918 was heavily influenced by the Rising and the reaction of the authorities to it. Prior to that point Irish nationalists had generally voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party, who advocated for Home Rule. Following the Rising most nationalists no longer believed that Home Rule was a goal worth aiming for. Instead they voted for the party that advocated for Irish independence, Sinn Fein. The result was that Sinn Fein won 73 out of 105 Irish seats, 67 of which they took from the IPP. One of those was Kildare North.

The results of the 1918 election, showing the sweeping victory for Sinn Fein.

Following the election Sinn Fein MPs like Domhnall refused to take their seats in Parliament, in part because this would have required them to take an oath of allegiance to the King. Instead 27 of their elected representatives assembled in Dublin and declared themselves the first parliament of an independent Ireland: “Dáil Éireann”. There would have been more of them, but 33 of the elected Republicans were in prison at the time. (That includes Constance Markievicz, the first women elected as a member of parliament in both British and Irish history.) At the time the government refused to recognise the Dáil, but nowadays this is officially considered to be the first iteration of the body.

The declaration by the first Dáil coincided with the “official” start of the Irish War of Independence. The Irish Volunteers had been reformed into the Irish Republican Army, and on the same day as the formation of the Dáil they attacked a group of police officers, killing two of them. This began two years of guerrilla warfare which Domhnall was an active participant in, along with his son Joe and his daughter’s husband Mick O’Neill. The heavy British Army presence in Kildare made it quieter than the rest of the country but there was still action including attacks on Maynooth Town Hall as well as intelligence gathering on troop movements. Right at the end of the war a major attack was planned on a troop train but it ended in a disaster when they were detected right before their attack. Fortunately for them this came right at the point of a ceasefire being declared in the war, which saved them from reprisals.

1921 was the year that Irish independence was formally established, along with the election of the Second Dáil. Dohmnall stood for Sinn Fein again and was elected again. Like many in the Republican movement though he was unhappy with the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had established the “Free State”. It left Ireland as a part of the British Empire for starters. But the most controversial part was that it ratified the partition of Ireland, allowing the six north-eastern counties to opt out of the new Free State and rejoin the United Kingdom. This created tensions that resulted in a 1922 election where “Pro-Treaty Sinn Fein” ran against “Anti-Treaty Sinn Fein”. Domhnall stood for the anti-treaty party and was defeated. This election didn’t diffuse the tension between the two factions, and a civil war broke out in the summer of 1922.

The prison in Dundalk where Domhnall was held.

As a former TD and veteran of the Rising, Domhnall was enough in the public eye that he was among those arrested in the early days of the war while he was mobilising with the anti-treaty forces. He was imprisoned in Dundalk, alongside several hundred other men. One of those men was Frank Aiken, who had been the commander of the military base there up until the 16th July. He had tried to stay out of the Civil War, but the large number of anti-treaty troops on the base led another commander to mount a takeover of the base and arrest all those who wouldn’t formally join the pro-treaty side.

On the 27th July a group of men who had fought beside Aiken in the War of Independence bombed a wall of the prison and rescued several men, including Frank Aiken. Two weeks later Aiken returned, blowing open the gates of the military base and leading an assault that resulted in the anti-treaty forces seizing the town. The prisoners, including Domhnall Ua Buachalla, were released. Domhnall headed back to Dublin, as he was a bit too old (at 56) for the countryside guerrilla fighting that the war became. He spent the next few months in hiding before he was recognised and arrested in early 1923.

Domhnall was an an internment camp as the Civil War gradually wound down to an end. After most of the anti-treaty leadership were either captured or killed and it became clear the war was unwinnable, Frank Aiken (who had succeeded to the leadership of the anti-treaty forces) declared a ceasefire. Most of the anti-treaty forces were interned alongside Domhnall, and it was months or even years before they were released.

In 1926 Eamonn de Valera, the leader of Sinn Fein who Domhnall had fought beside in the Easter Rising, founded a new political party. Part of the conditions of the Treaty had been that TDs and Senators had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, so Sinn Fein members had refused to take their seats. Now that the oath was being removed, there was dispute as to whether this meant that they could take their setas now or if they still refused to accept the Free State as legitimate. When the party’s annual conference passed a motion that they should not take their seats, those who disagreed left and formed a new party called Fianna Fail. De Valera was their first leader, and his old friend Domhnall Ua Buachalla was a founder member.

Domhnall was among those elected as TDs for the new party in the 1927 election. The oath of loyalty was actually still in effect at this time, but having gone to the effort of splitting from Sinn Fein it was decided that the Fianna Fail members would still take their seats in the house. (The party leadership officially declared the oath “an empty formula”.) They won 44 seats out of 153, the majority taken from Sinn Fein. This established them as the largest opposition party, and over the next five years they worked to consolidate their position and legitimise themselves.

Fianna Fail won a majority in the 1932 elections, aided by the effects of the Great Depression, which helped to turn people against the government. Domhnall, however, lost his seat. As compensation de Valera appointed him as the head of a commission investigating conditions in the Gaeltacht, areas of Ireland where it was officially recognised that Irish was the first language. This meshed well with Domhnall’s own interests, and he was happy to step out of the public eye. He had never really been happy with his position as a TD, and had always disliked public office. He had no idea that de Valera was about to ask him to take on the most public office in the country.

The separation between Ireland and Britain was a messy one. The new Irish government wanted to establish a Republic, free of all ties to the former occupiers. The British were ideologically opposed to giving up territory that easily though, and the most they were prepared to concede was independence within the British Empire. The new Irish Free State was a “Dominion of the British Empire”, another facet of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had provoked the civil war. The best that the government could do was copy the rules of another dominion, Canada, which had achieved “de facto” independence. The representative of Empire there was largely ceremonial, and Ireland copied the same language over into its own constitution. That was why they created the same office for that representative: Governor-General.

Tim Healey and James McNeill.

The first governor-general of the Irish Free State was Tim Healy, a former MP who had campaigned for Home Rule but opposed partition. He was trusted by the Irish government, but his first loyalty was always to the British Government. Healy was succeeded by James McNeill, one of those who had drafted the Free State’s constitution. McNeill found himself in an awkward position in 1932 when Fianna Fail were elected, as he was now the constitutional figurehead of a government that actively wanted to get rid of him. After several deliberate humiliations of him by government ministers and a public feud with de Valera, McNeill resigned a month before the end of his term.

De Valera was left to decide who to appoint as the new governor-general. He wanted someone who would take the job but be willing to stay completely out of the public eye. The self-effacing Domhnall Ua Buachalla, who had only reluctantly been pulled into the office of TD, was perfect. It was just a bonus that this meant the governor-general would be an outspoken Irish nationalist who had been arrested for armed rebellion against the crown. The request came as a great shock to Domhnall, and it took him several weeks to decide on an answer. Eventually, swayed by his friendship and faith in de Valera, he agreed.

As a mark of his intentions, when Domhnall swore an oath of loyalty to King George V as part of assuming the office he did so in Irish. Once in the job (which he always referred to as “Seanascal”, the Irish equivalent of the role) he and de Valera conspired to keep his public appearances to the bare minimum. He was supposed to dissolve the Dail, pass on proclamations from the King, and appoint members to the “Executive Council”. The council was where all the power vested in his role was passed on to, and de Valera’s official title was “President of the Executive Council”. In order to reduce his pubic profile further, Domhnall did not take up residence in the Viceregal Lodge (nowadays better known as “Aras an Uachtarain”) but rented a house in Monkstown. This would later cause issues.

Exactly what de Valera’s long term plan was is up for debate, but in 1936 a golden opportunity fell into his lap. When King Edward’s plan to marry Wallis Simpson (link!) resulted in his being forced to abdicate the throne of England it caused a constitutional crisis throughout the Empire. All of the member states had to assent to the abdication. Ireland took advantage of this to pair its assent with formally exiting the Empire, becoming a republic. [2] As a result in December of 1936 Domhnall had the pleasure of signing a bill that officially abolished his job.

“Gorthleitreach”, Domhnall’s house in Monkstown that caused so much trouble. Source

This did lead to a rift between Domhnall and de Valera though, which stemmed from that house in Monkstown. Domhnall had rented it on a five year lease, with the understanding that the Irish government would cover the cost. (This was part of an arrangement where he only claimed £2000 of his £10,000 a year salary in order to devalue his position.) When the position was abolished eleven months before that lease expired, the government told him they were not going to pay the remainder of his rent. Domhnall wound up threatening them with a court case, and in order to avoid the public scandal they were forced into a generous settlement.

Domhnall attended the inauguration of his “successor” Douglas Hyde, the first President of Ireland. After that he retired from public life, concentrating on running his hardware store in Maynooth and on local cultural events. He became well known as a letter writer to Irish newspapers, frequently voicing his concern about the influence of foreign culture on the Irish way of life. He and de Valera reconciled, enough that when Dev became President himself in 1959 he appointed Domhnall as a member of his advisory council. This was largely a symbolic gesture though, as Domhnall was in his 90s by this point. He died four years later in 1963 and was given a state military funeral, recognising his status as a veteran of the Rising. Nowadays despite his accomplishments he is mostly an obscure figure, with his name known to few in the country he was once officially in charge of. One suspects that’s exactly the way the eternally modest Domhnall Ua Buachalla would have preferred it.

[1] The Fenian Brotherhood, founded a couple of years earlier in America by another Young Irelander refugee, got a lot more press (to the point that “Fenian” became a synonym for “Irish rebel”). This was partially due to the fact that it could operate more in the open, but was mostly due to its main purpose of raising funds to support the IRB.

[2] This actually proved quite tricky legally, and it wasn’t until 1949 that Ireland was unequivocally separated from the British crown.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/domhnall-ua-buachalla-rebel-and-last-governor-general-of-ireland/feed/0George Psalmanazar, Fake Formosanhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/george-psalmanazar-fake-formosan/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/george-psalmanazar-fake-formosan/#respondMon, 04 Mar 2019 11:30:52 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=74349In 1703, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, a traveler came to London Town. A native of a far-off land, kidnapped by Catholic missionaries but rescued by a Protestant minister, he was practically tailor-made for the fervently Protestant (and very anti-Catholic) people of London. He had been christened George Psalmanazar by his rescuer and […]

]]>In 1703, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, a traveler came to London Town. A native of a far-off land, kidnapped by Catholic missionaries but rescued by a Protestant minister, he was practically tailor-made for the fervently Protestant (and very anti-Catholic) people of London. He had been christened George Psalmanazar by his rescuer and he delighted the people with tales of the exotic customs and barbaric practices in his homeland, far-off Formosa (modern day Taiwan). To them it seemed almost unbelievable; but it would have been even more unbelievable to a modern viewer if they had seen the blonde, blue-eyed Psalmanazar telling these tales.

George Psalmanazar was not born in Formosa, of course. The only source for where he was actually born is his own autobiography, published after his death. If we are to believe him, he was born in the early 1680s somewhere on the road between Avignon and Rome, along the traditional route taken by pilgrims to the Holy City. He could have been born in Cannes or Monaco, but he never gave the exact place. He also chose not to reveal the name he was born under, remaining George Psalmanazar even in death.

George claimed to be from a respectable but impoverished Catholic family, and was given an education at a free religious school. He was intelligent and creative, and swiftly became fluent in Latin. His father had left his family to go and work in Germany for some reason, so he was raised primarily by his mother. He was a good enough student that he was taken with a group of other boys to study at a Jesuit’s college; but he suffered there from being suddenly put into a much more advanced class than he was used to. He still did well enough that he was invited to join the Society and train for the priesthood, but his mother refused to allow this.

Avignon in the 17th century, drawn by Israel Silvestre.

Instead George went to a university operated by the Dominican Order, but he found it not really to his liking. When he sent a complaining letter to his mother she arranged for him to take a holiday in Avignon, where he stayed with a councilor from his home town who was visiting the city. He stayed in Avignon for some time, trying his hand at being a tutor among other things, but eventually fell into poverty. He decided to head home, and that was when he first thought of the scheme that would change his life.

Since his home was on the route pilgrims took to Rome, it occurred to George that he could make his journey in relative comfort if he was able to take advantage of the charity given to those pilgrims. So he lied to the authorities and got himself documents certifying that he was an Irish pilgrim on his way to Rome. To complete his imposture he stole a pilgrim’s cloak and staff from a local church and then headed out on the road.

George did not make for a very convincing Irishman, partly because he did not speak the language and partly because he knew nothing about the country. Still he made enough money begging that he strongly considered traveling on to Rome. He claimed that it was his mother’s idea that he change direction and use his pilgrim’s garb to head north to visit his father in Germany.

Hanging corpses in gibbets was a common practice to try to discourage crime.

It was a long trek to Germany, and what stuck in George’s mind most from the trip were the corpses of executed criminals he would pass at the crossroads. Most had been executed for preying on travelers, and he also saw monuments to those who had been killed by these bandits. Still he managed to avoid meeting such a fate himself and eventually made it to Germany where, at the age of sixteen, he met his father for the first time in ten years.

It’s unclear exactly what George’s father thought when his son, dressed as a poor pilgrim, suddenly turned up in front of him. George says that his father did try to persuade him to stay in Germany, but he was dubious. Among other things he found that the Latin he had learned in southern France had an accent that was difficult for German-born Latin speakers to understand. In addition though it had been fifty years since the end of the Thirty Years War the country was still recovering from it both economically and mentally. So George decided to continue traveling, and this was where he hit on the scheme that would make him famous.

George’s plan can be summed up pretty simply: pretend to be Japanese. This grew out of his original habit of pretending to be Irish; a plan which had almost come unstuck several times. His solution, he decided, was to pick an island nation much further away. His Jesuit teachers had taught him about the missions to Japan and a rough knowledge of them, including that they had their own writing method. He didn’t know that this consisted of ideograms though, so he invented an alphabet that still followed the 26-character Roman style. After practicing that for a while and inventing a basic language to go with it, he set off.

The Shrine of the Three Kings

The first destination on George’s itinerary was Cologne, home to the Shrine of the Three Kings. This shrine allegedly contains the bones of the Three Wise Men from the New Testament, sent from Constantinople to Milan by Constantine and then looted from Milan by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Regardless of whether it did contain their genuine remains or not, it was considered the holiest relic in Germany and the prime destination for pilgrims.

George’s new chosen lifestyle as a traveler did come with some risks, despite his disguise. When he crossed the border back into France he was imprisoned as a spy, though he was eventually released. As a result he began to improve on his imposture, inventing customs for himself such as eating raw meat and sleeping upright in a chair. His story was that he had been converted by Jesuit missionaries and traveled back to Europe with them, a semi-plausible story since the only thing most people knew about Japan was that its emperor persecuted Christians. Over the next few years he traveled around most of western Europe under this pretense.

Life on the road proved hard for George, though. He tried (under his “Japanese” disguise) to enlist in the Dutch army; but his recruiting officer decided that he was unfit for service. Instead the officer gave him a job in a coffee-house he owned in Aachen. He hoped that this peculiar “foreigner” might be a curiosity that drew crowds, though this didn’t quite work. This may have been what planted the seed in George’s mind that his false persona could be used for fame.

The altars that George would later describe for his invented faith.

His opportunity to do this came when he was sent away from the coffee-house on an errand to another city. While passing through a town near Cologne he met a man recruiting for the local Count’s army, and he signed up. He still maintained his facade of being “Japanese” throughout his service, which led to him moving through several companies. It was at one of these that he took the name of “Salamanzer”, inspired by the biblical Shalmaneser. He even invented his own “religion” to pass as a heathen, basing it on sun-worship and inventing a language for his prayers. Eventually he wound up in a mercenary company that mixed French and Scottish soldiers, and it was here that he met Alexander Innes.

The commanding officer of the regiment, Brigadier George Lauder, was greatly curious to see this strange foreigner who had joined his troop. (By now George had changed his supposed nationality from Japanese to “Formosan”, to further minimise his chances of being caught out.) Lauder invited George to dine with him at his house, along with several of his officers. One of those was a Scottish chaplain named Alexander Innes. George had a habit of tormenting churchmen through asking “innocent” questions that he (with his own theological training) knew would be difficult to answer. One of those he tweaked was no friend to Alexander, and the Scotsman soon took a liking to him.

Alexander was apparently taken in by George’s “heathen” persona, and decided that to convert such a heathen to Anglicanism and bring him back to London would make him a celebrity. (Or he recognised the fraud and decided to take advantage of it.) He set about trying to convince George that Anglicans were far superior to the Catholic missionaries who had “kidnapped him from his home island”. He mixed this in with gifts of money, enough to convince George to keep coming back to him. When he offered to get George discharged from the regiment and to take him back to London with him, George (who was thoroughly sick of soldiering) accepted.

Henry Compton, the bishop who invited George to come to London.

Alexander lost no time in officially inducting his new convert into the Anglican faith. George Lauder agreed to stand as godfather at the baptism, which was why George Psalmanazer took the brigadier’s name as his own. After that, as soon as an official invitation from the Bishop of London arrived, they set off. They passed through Rotterdam, which was the first real test of George’s false nationality now that he had put so much focus on it. His diet of raw meat and vegetables convinced them he was genuine though, and so he and Alexander headed on to London. They arrived at the end of 1703.

George’s newly-minted life story was tailor-made to be sympathetic to the people of London. He claimed to have been kidnapped from Formosa by Jesuits and brought back to Avignon, where they attempted to convert him to Catholicism. When he refused they threatened to turn him over to the Inquisition as a heretic; so he escaped and went on the run. Naturally he had headed to the Protestant part of Europe, where he had found work as a mercenary. In order to put the seal on this, George (who had by now perfected his invented “Formosan”) presented a translation of the Anglican catechism to the bishop as a gift.

The city lapped all of this up, and George soon found himself a celebrity. Of course, he had challengers. He could never admit he was wrong, for starters, and so he was forced to cling to his initial statements that Formosa was a part of the Japanese empire and that it was heavily populated. He also could not admit that it was a sparsely populated Chinese territory, as there had previously been Chinese visitors to London (including a Chinese man named Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung twenty years earlier). This controversy led to his being invited to the Royal Society to debate one of those same people he had demonised: a Jesuit missionary named Father Fountenay. Luckily for George his opponent was armed only with the facts, while George had prejudice on his side. He successfully convinced the Society of his bona fides and won himself some powerful patrons.

Those patrons sponsored George to spend six months at Oxford, allegedly to teach “Formosan” to prospective missionaries. In fact he spent more time giving lectures on the customs he invented for Formosa, all guaranteed to titillate the audiences. To play this up he put special emphasis on things like cannibalism and human sacrifice. He claimed to have no aversion to eating human flesh, but that he accepted that it would be incredibly rude to do so in Europe. Human flesh was considered a delicacy in Formosa, he told them, because it was illegal to kill someone for food. Instead only those executed or killed in human sacrifice were permitted to be eaten, and their flesh fetched a high price. (Husbands could also eat their wives if they were unfaithful, a salacious detail that went down well with the armchair moralists.)

George elaborated on his Formosa in the book he published that year, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan. In this entirely fictional book, George took inspiration not just from missionary tales of the far east but also stories being brought back from South America by the Conquistadors. It might be from the Xes liberally deployed in the Spanish transliterations of Aztec words, for example, that he decided to named the capital of Formosa “Xternetsa”.

In George’s history of Formosa, it had been an independent kingdom up until recently. (Apart from a brief occupation by the Tartars that had been driven out by rebellion.) He flirted with historical accuracy by mentioning the long-running war the island had with China, but in his telling the Chinese were defeated. Instead the country was conquered by Japan, and specifically by a Chinese man named “Meryaandanoo” who had schemed and murdered his way to the Imperial throne. Through treachery and through abuse of the laws of diplomacy he conquered Formosa, bringing it into the Japanese empire.

The “king and queen of Formosa”.

This subject kingdom had harsh laws, and George went into detail on this legal code. Though Christianity was heavily persecuted, many other religions were tolerated. This included a form of atheist reincarnation belief, a worship of idols, and a monotheistic faith which worshiped the sun and stars as messengers of a god too terrifying to worship directly. The main religion though was one where an all-powerful god was honoured through the human sacrifice of children (at the rate of 18000 a year) along with the sacrifice of animals and through prayer. The prophet of this god had been called Psalmanazar, and George claimed to have originally been named for him. (It’s worth noting that the first section of the book was George’s recounting of his own “conversion” to Christianity, along with a bunch of frankly rather banal theological diatribes.)

One interesting tweak in George’s description of the primary Formosan belief was that it offered no guidance as to what happened after death. Their holy book (the “Jarhabadiond”) simply promised “great happiness” after death to those who followed both the religious and civil laws. But as to the details, that was a matter of much philosophical debate. Some advocated reincarnation (with George probably cribbing this from other travelogues), with the ultimate goal of this cycle being to become a star. Souls did penance by passing through the bodies of beasts, with George saying that this was why only beasts who had been sacrificed could be eaten as food. Damned souls either became trapped in “evil beasts” (”Lyons, Wolfs, Tigers, Apes, Cats, Swine, Serpents”) or became ghosts and devils.

An illustration of the “people of Formosa”, featuring a man in metal underwear and a married woman wearing a mask.

George invented many details of Formosan life, such as that they had wooden hourglasses or that the men and women constantly smoked opium. (George himself had a solid opium habit by now.) He wrote that the women all wore gowns (though the quality varied by class) while the noblemen and the common men wore animal skins, wore kimonos, all gaping open. Their modesty was preserved by posing pouches normally made of metal. The metal was either brass, silver, or gold; depending on the class of the Formosan in question. (The poorest were forced to substitute bark or seashells.) Men wore their hair short and some (but not all) had beards. Married women wore masks while out in public, while widows wore wreaths in their hair.

The human sacrifice that George invented was entirely of young male children, which provided the justification for the polygamy that he said was thus practically required on the island. (Though it could be that he decided he wanted polygamy, and so worked backwards from there to the sacrifice.) Taking a new wife did legally require a means test to ensure that the man could support her, since George’s imagined society was hardly so exotic and bizarre to allow women to work and earn wages. That would have been utterly unacceptable to the staid London audience.

The book concludes by describing the Japanese empire (details of which George stole from other travelogues) and the impact of Westerners on the islands. George happily throws his former Jesuit teachers under the bus, claiming that the persecution of Christianity in Japan (and by extension, “Formosa”) was all down to their “Popish Errors”. The appendix details George’s own travels (persuaded into a pilgrimage to Rome, kidnapped to Avignon and threatened with torture, and then escaping to Germany and becoming a mercenary.)

A fold-out drawing of a “Formosan funeral”.

For all the detail he goes into, though, George’s invented Formosa ultimately rings hollow. There is no depth to his religion, no folklore and wealth of tales for him to draw on. His chapter on “superstitions”, for example, is merely about seeing omens in things while his “wildlife” chapter merely mentions that Formosa is inhabited by a lot of animals that do not breed in England (including camels, wolves, crocodiles and chameleons.) [1] While George is to be commended for his general consistency and attention to detail, his false land still has a tendency to collapse under its own weight if it is looked at too closely.

Despite this, the book was a roaring success. George saw little of the money from this success though, as he had foolishly sold the rights for a flat fee of ten guineas. (This was still a considerable amount of money in 1704, of course.) He received a similar payment the next year for a reprinted edition, and the book was also translated into French and published in Paris. This did lead to some pushback, as it allowed those on the continent who were slandered in the appendix to read what George had written and to complain about it.

An image of a Devil icon added in the 1705 edition, along with a chapter detailing “devil worship” in Formosa.

This was symptomatic of the turning mood against George, as more and more cracks began to appear in his facade. Alexander Innes (who George claimed had become complicit in his fraud) secured a post as personal chaplain to Henri de Massue, Earl of Galway. Henri was a retired military officer but in 1704 he was appointed to lead the allied forces fighting in Portugal against , and Alexander went with him. George was thus deprived of a key confidante who could help him paper over those cracks.

By 1706 George was beginning to privately admit his fraud to those he trusted, though he maintained a public facade that he was “Formosan”. Though he continued to be challenged, there was in the end no grand unmasking. Instead the public generally just lost interest. The publication in 1710 of “An Enquiry into the Objections against George Psalmanazar of Formosa”, a spirited defence of George’s claims (which was probably written by George himself), seems to have been a cry for help more than anything else. By 1711 everyone seemed to be in denial that they had ever believed him at all, with the Spectator mocking him as part of their April Fool’s column:

On the first of April will be performed at the Play-house in the Hay-market an Opera call’d The Cruelty of Atreus. N.B. The scene wherein Thyestes eats his own children, is to be performed by the famous Mr. Psalmanazar, lately arrived from Formosa: the whole Supper being set to kettle-drums.

That was how the Psalmanazar scam ended; not with a bang but a whimper. George did make one final attempt to monetize his story, though. At the time (and indeed for the next two hundred years or so) there was a common practice in Europe of coating metal objects in a thick black lacquer both for decorative and waterproofing purposes. This was called “japanning”, because it started in imitation of Japanese lacquerware. George tried to market a variation that used white lacquer as “Formosan style”. It didn’t catch on.

A “map of the East Indies” by Emanuel Bowen that may have accompanied George’s article about Formosa. Source

With the failure of that scheme George disappeared mostly into obscurity, and eventually found work as an army clerk. Eventually a charitable priest sponsored him to formally study theology, just as he had wanted to do in his youth. With this academic qualification, George was able to find work in London as a jobbing writer. For low wages he produced pamphlets to order and wrote entries for encyclopedias, the latest craze to sweep the city. It was in one of these (Emanuel Bowen’s Complete System of Geography) that he wrote an entry for Formosa and (anonymously) admitted to his own hoax. He also said that a full confession would be published after his death.

This late career led to some final brushes with fame. Jonathan Swift, for example, gave George a shoutout in the introduction to A Modest Proposal. Swift admitted that his satirical suggestion that the poor sell their children to the rich as food was inspired by “the famous Salamanaazor, a Native of the island of Formosa”. By far the most significant of George’s new acquaintances was a young man named Samuel Johnson, who even now people could see was tinged with greatness. Many years later Dr Johnson was asked who was the best man he had ever known, and he replied “Psalmanazar”.

The portrait at the front of George’s memoirs.

This might have been because George became a lot more religious as he grew older, prompted by a near-fatal illness in 1728. He grew to regret the hoax he had played as a young man, which was a large part of his motivation for writing his autobiography. Another more niche regret was in the introduction of his autobiography, where he apologised for telling people that the secret to avoiding ill effects from opium was to mix it with orange juice. George himself had a serious opium addiction throughout his entire life.

In his old age George lived on a pension paid for by his admirers, proof that in their eyes at least he had redeemed himself. He died in 1763, aged around 80 years old. To his death he refused to admit his year of birth of the name he had been born under, for fear of bringing shame to his family. His autobiography was published after his death, and though it answered many questions about his early life it still kept those key details secret. All we know him by is the name that he chose for the lie that he told: George Psalmanazar, the man who did not come from Formosa.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/george-psalmanazar-fake-formosan/feed/0Hans Fallada, German Authorhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hans-fallada-german-author/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hans-fallada-german-author/#respondMon, 18 Feb 2019 11:34:34 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=73893Content warning: this column discusses suicide and episodes of suicidal ideation in the life of Hans Fallada. Societies don’t go wrong all at once. Things get worse by degrees, and it can slowly creep up on you. You convince yourself that things are still basically the same as they’ve always been, and then you hear […]

]]>Content warning: this column discusses suicide and episodes of suicidal ideation in the life of Hans Fallada.

Societies don’t go wrong all at once. Things get worse by degrees, and it can slowly creep up on you. You convince yourself that things are still basically the same as they’ve always been, and then you hear that people are being executed for peaceful protests while the regime are demanding you turn your talents to their use. Hans Fallada’s life under the Nazi regime was one of major compromises and minor defiance, all because like so many others he didn’t realise how bad things could (and would) get.

Though he became famous as Hans Fallada, that was only a pen name. His real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen was born in 1893 in Greifswald, a small coastal city on the German coast of the Baltic Sea. His family left there for Berlin when he was six years old because his father Wilhelm had been promoted. Wilhelm was a judge, and in 1899 he was promoted to the Kammergericht, Prussia’s supreme court. Eight years later he was promoted to the Reichsgericht, the supreme court for the entire German Empire.

As a result his family were well off, though the constant moving had a poor effect on Rudolf. When they moved to Berlin in 1900 he was put into a school with a good reputation, but which turned out to be a haven for bullies. At the age of 12 he tried to run away, but his parents found out his plans before he did. He was moved to a different school, where he did much better. Then Wilhelm was promoted in 1908. This meant that the family moved to Leipzig, where Rudolf was involved in a fateful accident.

In April of 1909, while riding a bicycle, Rudolf collided with a horse-drawn cart. He was run over by the wheels of the cart and kicked in the face by the horse, and he was not expected to survive through the night. But he did survive, though it took him a long time to recover from his injuries. It might have been during the treatment for this injury that he was first introduced to morphine.

The following year Rudolf went on a trip to Holland with his Wandervogel group. This was a movement in Germany affiliated with, but separate from, the Boy Scouts. (It was outlawed in 1933 for competing with the Hitler Youth, but was refounded after the war and still exists today.) He enjoyed the trip very much, but while on it he caught typhoid. The disease was treated and he recovered from it, but it seems to have caused him to begin suffering from depression. He started drinking heavily, which led to arguments with his parents. And eventually he began contemplating suicide.

Rudolf’s first two suicide attempts were unsuccessful. He took poison (provided by a friend, Hanns von Necker), but it didn’t work. Then he tried to cut his throat, but he couldn’t go through with it. At the time Germany seemed to be facing an epidemic of suicide among young men. The macho military culture combined with a disdain for discussing mental issues were a potent mix that has blighted many times and places throughout history. Three young men in Rudolf’s class killed themselves around the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911.

Rudolf’s own suicidal ideation was also fueled by guilt. He had been writing anonymous letters pestering a young woman he was obsessed with, but suspicion over them had fallen on a friend of his. So he planned to declare his guilt in a suicide note and then drown himself. He told the friend, who told his mother, who staged an intervention. Rudolf was restrained, and eventually was taken for the first time to a psychiatric clinic. It would not be the last.

Rudolf’s parents moved him to a new school in Rudolstadt, where his friend Hanns von Necker was studying. They didn’t know that Hanns had aided one of Rudolf’s previous attempts. In fact Rudolf wound up foiling one of Hanns’ suicide attempts by hiding his revolver. But when Rudolf found no recognition in his new school for his poetry and writing, he despaired and began listening to Hanns. Rudolf had an obsession with the story of Dorian Gray, and the idea of people being dominated by stronger personalities. He had tried to make himself into a dominating person, but now he felt himself being dominated. Hanns had an idea for how they could kill themselves without causing their family despair or dishonour. They could die in a duel.

A statue of Rudolf with his rifle from an exhibition at the Jena Literature Museum. Source

They staged an argument where Rudolf “demanded satisfaction” from Hanns, setting the stage for their duel. Hanns had a revolver, while Rudolf borrowed a hunting rifle from his landlord. They headed out into the woods, where they took aim at each other and fired. They missed. Hanns had to show Rudolf how to reload his rifle, as he had never used one before. But despite that inexperience, in the next exchange of fire he managed to hit Hanns. Hanns begged Rudolf to finish him off, so he did. Then he used the last two bullets from the revolver on himself.

Rudolf was found staggering through the woods and taken to a hospital, where they found that a bullet had injured his lungs but missed his heart. Once again he wasn’t expected to survive through the night, and once again he defied that prediction. This time there were more consequences than the physical, though. Once it was clear that he was going to recover from his injuries, he was arrested for the murder of Hanns Dietrich von Necker.

Professor Otto Binswanger.

Luckily for Rudolf, his father knew the law inside and out. He ensured that his son was placed in a hospital whose director was one of the great psychiatrists of the day, Professor Otto Binswanger. Professor Binswanger wrote a report on young Rudolf showing that he was not of sound mind at the time of the shooting, and so the murder charge was dropped. Instead he was committed to Tannenfeld Sanatorium.

Rudolf remained in the sanatorium until September of 1913, by which time his condition had much improved. He had learned how to deal with his depression, as best he could. By his doctor’s recommendation he got a job working s a supervisor on a farm, as it was thought that physical exercise would help. Though he still had ambitions of being a writer, nothing had come of this by 1914 when World War I came burning across Europe, changing everyone’s lives forever.

Rudolf had been declared unfit for conscription during his time in Tannenfeld, and though he tried to enlist he was first refused, then (after his father intervened) accepted but discharged after a month. When the farm work proved too harsh on his health he became a potato salesman, though he continued to try to become a writer and translator. His younger brother Ulrich did join the army, and four years at the front transformed the brave young man (who was the darling of the Ditzen family) into a nervous wreck. Ulrich died in August of 1918, less than three months from the end of the war.

Like many young Germans in the despairing days after the war, Rudolf became addicted to morphine. He was treated with it for stomach ulcers in the winter of 1918, and moved from that into “recreational” use. Around the same time he finally finished his first novel: Der junge Goedeschal, a semi-autobiographical story of troubled youth. The novel was not a success, but it did give Rudolf his pen name. He took it from the Brothers Grimm. Hans came from Hans im Glück, the story of a man who works for seven years and is well rewarded, but who is cheated out of his wages in a series of bad deals on his way home. Due to his simple nature he interprets all of this as good luck. Fallada came from The Goose Girl, where it is the name of a magical horse who speaks only the truth; and who is killed to try to stop him telling it. Both give insight into Rudolf’s self image. They combined to make the name that Rudolf would become famous under: “Hans Fallada”.

Fame would be a while coming, though. While he was working on the proofs for Goedeschal Rudolf suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to Tannenfeld. There he was treated for his morphine addiction. By the time he was discharged his book had been released. It hadn’t taken the world by storm, but it had done well enough that the publisher asked him to produce a second novel. Rudolf wrote an experimental novel called Die Kuh, der Schuh, dann du (”The Cow, the Shoe, then you”). It was rejected, but the publishers encouraged him to try again.

In 1923 Rudolf wrote Anton und Gerda. Though the heroes of the story are a schoolboy and a prostitute, the emotional content was largely based on an affair he had with a married sculptor named Annia Seyerlen. The ghost of Hanns von Necker also makes an appearance. It was Rudolf’s first critical success, though it wasn’t a matching popular success. His literary career was interrupted in 1923 when he was arrested for embezzlement. He had been stealing money from his employers to finance his morphine and cocaine habits. He was sentenced to six months in prison, but the sentence was deferred until the following year. In June of 1924 he reported to Greifswald prison.

Rudolf only spent five months in Greifswald before he was released for good behaviour, but it gives an important insight into his character. He kept a secret honest diary filled with defiance, but publicly he cooperated with the prison authorities and was promoted to trustee for betraying the escape plans of two other prisoners. He escaped from his imprisonment into writing, and emerged with a new novel called Im Blinzeln der großen Katze (”In A Wink Of A Big Cat’s Eye”). It was about a man awaiting trial for murder, a combination of his experiences as a teenager and his recent experience. He sold the manuscript to a publisher, but a combination of economic factors and changing public tastes meant it wasn’t released until after Hans Fallada was a famous name.

In 1925 Rudolf was working as the bookkeeper for an estate in Schlewswig-Holstein. It’s a sign of how turbulent Germany was at the time that a man with a conviction for embezzlement could be allowed back into such a position of trust. A trust he abused when he relapsed into his addictions on a business trip and stole all the money he had been trusted with. When he sobered up he realised that his history meant that he was likely to be committed to a mental hospital. He didn’t want that; he thought that he had a better chance of kicking his addictions and regaining his mental stability in a regular prison. So he surrendered to the authorities, made a confession to a bunch of additional fake embezzlement charges, and pleaded guilty at his trial. It worked, as he was sentenced to two years in a regular prison. But it also meant disgrace for his family, who now had a “hardened criminal” in their midst.

Rudolf was released in 1928 and moved to Hamburg, where he joined the Order of the Good Templar, a temperance movement. Alcohol, morphine and cocaine had been his downfall and he hoped to make a fresh start. The Order helped him to do that, and it also introduced him to Anna Issel (nicknamed “Suse”) who he married in 1929. In 1930 they had their first child, who was named Ulrich after Rudolf’s dead younger brother. In 1930 he got a job in Berlin working at a publishing company, which revitalised his own writing. In 1931 he released Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (”Farmers, Bureaucrats and Bombs”) about rural corruption and revolution. It proved more political than intended. Rudolf’s own sympathies were with the left-wing SDP party, but the book was interpreted as supporting the rightwing momvements of the day. This led to success, but unnerved Rudolf.

Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben established “Hans Fallada” as a writer to watch out for, and helped Rudolf to get work writing reviews and short stories. But it was his following novel that pushed him to the next level. Kleiner Mann, was nun? (”Little Man, What Now?”) started out as a novel about unemployment but morphed into a story about how a weak man could be supported and sustained by a better woman. The protagonist is Johannes Pinneburg, a man who struggles to support his family in Germany’s economic crisis. But the hero is his wife Emma (known as Lämmchen, or “Lambkin”) who is the one that holds their family together through thick and thin. Lämmchen was based on Rudolf’s own wife Anna, of course. She was annoyed by this more than anything else; she thought that Lämmchen was an unrealistically idealised character. But unrealistic or not, the character struck a chord.

Rudolf in 1930, right when “Hans Fallada” became a household name. Source

“Little Man” launched in the summer of 1932 and was an immediate success. Within four months it had sold over twenty thousand copies. Rudolf was astonished, as he thought it was worse than his previous novels. But he had hit exactly the right novel for exactly the right time. Between the sales, the film rights and the companies looking for translation rights, Rudolf was now a rich man. All of a sudden the lean years were over, and the future looked bright. Or it would have, if it hadn’t been 1932 in Germany.

In February of 1933 Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, was firebombed. Whether the fire was started by a Communist agitator (as the government claimed) or whether it was a “false flag” operation by the Nazi party, the result was the same. The recently sworn in Chancellor of the coalition government, Adolf Hitler, issued an emergency decree. Eighty-three Communist MPs were arrested. Almost all civil liberties, including freedom of speech and the right to privacy, were suspended. With their opposition suppressed the Nazis were able to manipulate the democratic process, and by the end of March fascism had conquered Germany. Adolf Hitler was now dictator, and the Nazi regime had begun.

The new regime literally came to Rudolf’s front door in April of 1933. He had just bought a house and the couple who he bought it from (who were Nazi party members) denounced him as a traitor so that they could repossess it. Though there was no evidence against him he was held without charge or legal representation for ten days. It was only thanks to his publisher hiring a lawyer on his behalf that he was released. Despite this the house (which he had paid for) was taken from him and given back to the couple he had bought it from. It was a stark lesson for the judge’s son in how little justice meant to the new regime.

The house in Carwitz where Rudolf tried to hide from the world.

In July of 1933 Rudolf’s wife Anna gave birth to twins, but one of them was injured during birth and only lived for a few hours. It was a blow, coming on top of the mounting stress as writers were arrested and publishers shut down by the Nazi party. Rudolf’s response was to try to move to the countryside and isolate himself from the new regime, to avoid political entanglements and to try to keep his own nose clean. However as a writer who required a public profile this was a plan that was always doomed to fail.

Rudolf’s first compromise with the new regime came with the release of a new edition of “Little Man” which, among other minor revisions, changed a character who was an unsympathetic bully from a Nazi party member into a professional footballer. His next novel (about the failings of the criminal justice system) included a foreword that these failings were now a thing of the past under the new regime. That was how he tried to insulate himself, but it failed. The Nazi press (by now the only press) attacked it as “written badly and without conscience”. Rudolf was going to respond to these attacks, but his publisher convinced him it would be suicidal to do so. With a new daughter (named Lore), Rudolf could not take that type of risk.

It was these attacks that first made Rudolf start to think about emigrating. Many writers were moving abroad, but Rudolf was reluctant. He loved his country life in northern Germany, and he convinced himself that he could live nowhere else. Germany seemed less fond of him. His next novel was acclaimed by the foreign press, but denounced as “not the type of book we need nowadays” by the Nazis. Stress over this contributed to a nervous breakdown in 1935 that put him into hospital. A few months after he was released he was told that he had been officially declared an “undesirable author”. His books weren’t banned, but he was not allowed to sell his work abroad or have it translated.

Further attacks made Rudolf decide that he had to emigrate. He put his farm up for sale, but selling it was more difficult than he had expected. In the meantime his main source of income was writing children’s books, where he could avoid any kind of relevance that might lead to trouble. One of his books was still banned in 1937 for mentioning the forbidden holiday of “Christmas”. In desperation Rudolf decided to return to the one novel of his that the Nazis had liked, and to write a new story set during the economic crisis of the 1920s.

Wolf Among Wolves is the story of a year in the life of Wolfgang Pagel and his girlfriend Petra Ledig, as they do their best to survive a country being ravaged by inflation. Since the novel tied into the Nazi narrative of the chaos endemic to democracy and the Weimar Republic, it went down a storm. Though it was far from being pro-Nazi, it still received the regime’s stamp of approval. And it got Rudolf one new and very influential fan: Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

As a result of this Rudolf was commissioned to write a novel that could be turned into a film about the life of a “typical German family” from 1914 to 1933. He tried to avoid turning this into the celebration of the Nazis that it was meant to be by ending the novel in 1928, but Goebbels insisted. The hero’s original “happy ending” (a simple country life) instead was rewritten to becoming a Nazi Party member. To add insult to injury, the film version never happened because a senior Nazi official decided he didn’t like Rudolf.

Over the last few months of 1938 as Germany began its path to war most of the Ditzen family’s friends and acquaintances began to leave Germany. Rudolf was going to be among them, and a ship to take his family secretly to England had already been arranged, but just before they were about to leave he changed his mind and decided to stay. It was his last chance to escape what Germany had become, and what it was about to become. War was descending on Europe.

Rudolf continued to try to avoid politics through writing comic novels and children’s stories, but the outbreak of the war meant an end to the English sales which had been a large part of his income. Paper rationing also affected his sales, while he found that country life was much less idyllic when jealous neighbours were able to file reports on them for tiny infractions. Under the stress his marriage suffered greatly. He did release the first volume of his memoirs around this time, though he admitted himself to friends that it was “full of lies”. The truth was a poor shield in the Third Reich.

The paper shortage in 1942 meant that publication of all books not directly tied to the war effort were suspended indefinitely, while the declaration of “total war” after the defeat at Stalingrad meant that even the 49 year old Rudolf could be drafted. Ironically around the same time he was under criminal investigation as a possible drug addict. Though this led to him being treated in a clinic for depression, the charges were dropped. He could not go without making some contribution to the war effort though, so he accepted an invitation to tour France and meet the troops there. It wasn’t really an invitation he could have refused.

As the war worsened for Germany, the farm at Carwitz became a refuge for their extended family. Anna’s two sisters and her niece along with Rudolf’s elderly mother all moved in. It was around this time that his wife discovered that he had been having an affair with a local woman. Though he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage, the fact that this time it had taken place under their own roof was too much. Encouraged by her relations (and by Rudolf’s mother), Anna applied for a divorce.

In 1944, with his publication contracts in tatters, Rudolf settled on a risky strategy. He agreed to write a novel for the German Propaganda Ministry about evil Jewish bankers, while hoping to be able to hold out until the inevitable end of the war and not to have to actually write it. He also began a relationship with Ulla Losch, the twenty-two year old widow of a soap magnate. He was still living in Carwitz at the time though, and in August of 1944 he got into an argument with his ex-wife that reached such heights the police were called. As a result of this he was sent somewhere he had once gone to prison to avoid: a mental asylum.

Mental asylums in Nazi Germany were not a good place to be. Euthanasia for “the incurable” was state policy, after all. Rudolf had the shield of Kutisker, the novel he was writing for the propaganda ministry. As a result he was provided with pens, paper, peace and quiet. But he didn’t work on Kutisker. Instead (using bad handwriting and overlapping letters to disguise what he was working on) he wrote Der Trinker. It was a semi-autobiographical novel about a successful businessman who descends into alcoholism and ruins his life. Arrested for the attempted murder of his wife, he commits suicide by deliberately infecting himself with tuberculosis. In addition to this novel, Rudolf wrote several short stories and a memoir of life in the Reich. It wasn’t a fully truthful account, as it did include a great deal of self-justification for his compromises with the regime. But it was frank enough to get him executed if he was caught.

He wasn’t caught. Instead he smuggled his manuscript out while he was on day release in the autumn of 1944. On the same trip he made an attempt to mend his bridges with Anna, who agreed to forgive him if he would stop his drinking. In order to reinforce this reconciliation, he legally assigned the ownership of the farm and house at Carwitz over to her. He was released in December, and after finalizing his reconciliation with his ex-wife he went to visit Ulla Losch to break off their relationship. It didn’t quite go as planned. Instead on the 29th of December he and Ulla announced their engagement. They were married on the 1st February 1945 and settled in Feldberg, near Carwitz.

In April of 1945 the Soviet army, conquering its way through Germany, rolled over Carwitz. Anna Ditzen was able to hide the 11-year old Lore from the soldiers, but she herself was raped and injured severely enough that she had to be hospitalised. This was a common fate for woman as the Russian soldiers arrived, especially those who lacked any form of protection. Ulla escaped that fate, whether through the protection of her riches or her new husband. Rudolf himself collaborated with the invaders, giving a speech to the locals that “The Soviets are our friends”. It’s unlikely that it was well-received, given what was going on. Perhaps as a result of giving this speech Rudolph was appointed as mayor of Feldberg by the Russians in May 1945.

It was a difficult job. Not only were Soviet troops still taking revenge on isolated farmsteads, but many of the locals were also resorting to theft as well. The stress took its toll on Rudolf, and he wound up taking morphine to cope with it. This was partly due to peer pressure from Ulla, who had always had a morphine problem. His health was ill-equipped to cope with this, and by August he had been admitted to hospital after a complete collapse. After he was released the couple abandoned Feldberg and headed to Berlin.

Rudolf and Ulla had not officially applied for residence in Berlin, because they thought they would be refused permission to move. As a result they had no ration cards, and since they were both still addicted to morphine times were very hard. In October Rudolf managed to contact Johannes Becher, a German writer who was working for the Soviets. He was keen to get Rudolf writing again and got him and Ulla ration cards. He was also the one who gave Rudolf a captured Gestapo file that would form the basis of Rudolf’s final novel, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (”Everyone dies alone”).

Elise and Otto Hampel.

The file was about Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-aged married couple. Elise’s brother had been killed fighting in France, which had crystallised their opposition to the war. They had never been a part of the “German Resistance”, but had acted on their own to try to speak out anonymously against the war. From 1940 until 1942 they had written two hundred postcards denouncing the war and the Nazi regime. Elise and Otto had dropped these into random mailboxes or left them in apartment stairways all around Berlin. They were eventually caught in 1942, and after they proudly admitted their actions they were executed by guillotine. [1]

Before he wrote Jeder stirbt für sich allein, Rudolf wrote Der Alpdruck (”The Nightmare”). This was a half-fictionalized memoir of the year after the end of the war. While he was writing it his second marriage hit stormy waters, partially because of Ulla’s inability to conceive children but mostly due to her morphine addiction and the debts she ran up to maintain it. Despite this distraction, he completed Jeder stirbt für sich allein in October. It was the first novel he had felt proud of since Wolf among Wolves.

Rudolf did not live to see the publication of his final novel. In December of 1946 he and Ulla were admitted to hospital together, the result of overdosing on sleeping pills. Rudolf’s health did not recover, and he died in February of 1947 of heart failure. He was originally buried in Pankow Cemetery in Berlin, but in 1981 his first wife Anna (by then 80 years old) succeeded in a campaign to have him reburied in Carwitz.

“Hans Fallada” remained popular in Germany after his death, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. However his complicated history meant that his works fell out of print outside of Germany, and in fact only two of his books (Der Trinker and a new translation of Little Man – What Now?) were published in English for the rest of the 20th century. One of the few academics outside Germany who studied his work was Professor Jenny Williams of UCD, whose biography of him (More Lives Than One) remains the premier English-language book on Hans Fallada. Her book was first published in 1998, but it was the 2009 publication of an English translation of Everyone Dies Alone that made Hans Fallada once again well known in the English-speaking world. It was a surprise best-seller, and last year it was made into a film with Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson in the lead roles. As a complex story of failed resistance and doomed protagonists, it seems fitting that it’s what Rudolf Ditzen (or rather, “Hans Fallada”), is remembered for.)

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hans-fallada-german-author/feed/0Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Artist of Montmartrehttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/henri-de-toulouse-lautrec-artist-of-montmartre/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/henri-de-toulouse-lautrec-artist-of-montmartre/#respondMon, 04 Feb 2019 11:30:00 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=73315One of the big problems with using paintings and other art pieces as a historical source is that most artists don’t depict reality as it is but rather reality as they wished it would be. Idealised and more attractive versions of historical figures stride through landscapes conveniently cleansed of any unwanted details. This is why […]

]]>One of the big problems with using paintings and other art pieces as a historical source is that most artists don’t depict reality as it is but rather reality as they wished it would be. Idealised and more attractive versions of historical figures stride through landscapes conveniently cleansed of any unwanted details. This is why Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is so fondly remembered as the “recorder of Montmartre”. His paintings showed real people living real lives, with all the ugliness that sometimes entailed. Henri’s own life left him fully conscious of the darkness reality could entail.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in November of 1864 in the town of Albi in southern France. As the “de” in his name would imply, he was of noble heritage. His father Alphonse was the Compte de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa; the heir to three noble French families dating back centuries. That nobility did not convey the same privileges it had a hundred years earlier, but it also didn’t carry the risk it had seventy years earlier. In the empire of Napoleon III (and in the Third Republic, which succeeded him in 1870) they were effectively just another well-off family, albeit one with a certain amount of social cachet. And some traditional obligations.

Henri’s mother Adele was also descended from the nobility. In fact she was descended from most of the same nobility as Alphonse, which was a problem. They were cousins, who had married in order to preserve a family fortune and noble heritage. (Alphonse’s brother also married Adele’s sister.) This close relationship was why Henri (ike several of his relatives) suffered from a rare genetic disorder, though it’s hard to tell exactly which one. He probably suffered from pycnodysostosis, which is often known as “Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome” because of this. It’s a disorder where the body lacks a key enzyme for bone development, resulting in (among other things) brittle and poorly developed leg bones.

Henri had a younger brother, but he died in 1868 at only a year old. This was apparently the final straw for his parents’ marriage, as they permanently separated afterwards. Divorce was out of the question, of course, as Adele was highly religious. She kept custody of Henri and moved to Paris, while his father was effectively absent from the boy’s life. He was a notably eccentric man, something else which Henri inherited. Henri was happy in Paris but Adele had some concerns about his health, and sent him back to Albi when he was eleven years old. That was where he suffered a serious accident.

One of Henri’s first paintings, a drawing of a horse on his family’s estate.

The details of the accident are sketchy, but at the age of thirteen Henri broke his right femur. A year later he broke his left femur as well. At the time these two accidents were blamed for the fact that his legs stopped growing at this point, though if he did suffer from pycnodysostosis then they would have stopped growing regardless. The adult Henri was of average height sitting down, but was four feet and eight inches tall standing up. Naturally this had a serious impact on both his life and his outlook. Henri always considered himself an outcast, and he always felt most at home in the company of his fellow outcasts.

Whether or not the accidents were the cause of Henri’s height, they were definitely the genesis of his artistic career. Henri had always shown a talent for drawing but now unable to indulge in more athletic pursuits he was practically forced out of boredom to put in the work to make that talent blossom. His mother was delighted by this, especially since Henri was not a great student. Though he was originally enrolled in a college in Paris, after his accident he was tutored privately and passed his baccalaureate in 1881. After that his apprenticeship in art began.

A self portrait of Henri made around 1882.

His first tutor was a friend of his father named René Princeteau. René was from a noble family, like Henri, and like Henri he had something that set him apart. He had been born deaf. The two got on well and he taught Henri the basics of the trade, but Henri’s mother wanted to see her son become a fashionable society painter which René decidedly was not. So in 1882 he was taken out of René’s studio and enrolled him on the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied under the most noted portrait painter in Paris at the time, Léon Bonnat.

Léon Bonnat was much less sympathetic to Henri than René had been. He was very much an “Academy” painter, who believed that the rules should be followed above all else. He despised the Impressionists, who flouted those rules. This might have been why Henri came to be so heavily influenced by them. Despite the fact that the rancor between the two grew fierce, Henri did look back on this time fondly. Though Léon described his drawings as “atrocious”, Henri later said “the lashing of my former master pepped me up, and I didn’t spare myself.”

Léon left the school in 1883, and was replaced by Fernand Cormon. Nowadays Fernand is much better remembered as a teacher than a painter; as well as Henri he taught Vincent van Gogh, Émile Bernard and Eugène Boch among many other famous artists. At the time the paintings exhibited in the official annual exhibition of the Academie des Beaux-Arts (known simply as the Salon) were deeply conventional, and this was the type of painting that Fernand tried to impose on his pupils. Their later careers show how deeply unsuccessful he was at this, but his amiable disposition led him to encourage them in whatever path they chose.

It was while he was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts that Henri lost his virginity, something which had a profound impact on his life. While his fellow artists had numerous affairs with the models who posed in the studio, Henri was too self-conscious (and self-loathing) to even try to approach them. One of his friends there decided to try to coax him out of his shell, and persuaded a model named Marie Charlet to seduce him. This she did with gusto, boasting to her friends afterwards that “Portmanteau” (her nickname for Henri) was an excellent lover. This did a lot to enhance Henri’s reputation and his self-esteem, and it also awakened in him one of the appetites that would dominate his life.

His other appetite was for alcohol, which he came to rely on as a social crutch and as a way to deal with the constant poor treatment that he received for his height. At this time he confined himself mostly to beer, though this would change to harder drinks like absinthe later. It was probably due to these two appetites (and the disapproval of his very Catholic mother) that led Henri to move out and take up residence in the district of Paris that would become synonymous with the name Toulouse-Lautrec: Montmartre.

Out on the edge of the city (it had only officially been folded into the city in 1860) Montmartre’s inconvenient location for workers meant that the rents were cheap; which in turn drew artists, writers and other “bohemians” like flies. Their models also took up residence in the area, as did students and sex workers. This potent mix became the heart of the Belle Époque, France’s artistic golden age that began with the end of the war against Prussia in 1872 and was definitively ended 42 years later in the grim horror of the First World War.

The famous poster for “Le Chat Noir” painted by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

The heart of Montmarte in those years was Le Chat Noir, a nightclub that might have been the very first cabaret. The combination of tables where alcohol was served and a variety show meant that customers could converse among themselves or watch the shows as they wished, and the stage of Le Chat Noir soon became a place where dreams were realised. One of the stars of that stage was a comedian and singer named Aristide Bruant, while among the audience was Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. The two became good friends, and in fact Aristide may have been the first of Henri’s non-artist friends.

Another artist who frequented Le Chat Noir was Marie-Clementine Valadon, though at that time she was working primarily as an artist’s model. She had begun working as a model in 1880 aged fifteen, at that time using the name “Maria”. Prior to that she had trained as a circus acrobat, but an injury from a fall ended that career. She modeled for several artists over the next few years, the most famous of them being Renoir who painted her in Dance at Bougival. As was common she also slept with several of the men who painted her, which resulted in her becoming pregnant in 1883. Who the child’s father was is a matter of speculation, and though a painter named Miguel Utrillo claimed paternity he was almost certainly not the actual father. In any event the child was looked after by Maria’s mother, while she went back to work as a model.

“The Hangover”, Henri’s most famous painting of Suzanne.

It was as a model that she first encountered Henri, shortly after he had completed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts and begun working as an independent painter. That was in 1888. Maria became the model of some of Henri’s great paintings, including The Hangover: a painting of her sitting alone in a cafe grumpily drinking away the headache from the night before. She also became his lover, and then something more; she became his mistress. This was Henri’s first long-term relationship, one which was close enough that Maria opened up enough to show him something that she had never shown anyone: her own drawings. It was due to his encouragement that she started painting, eventually becoming one of the most famous female French painters of the fin de siecle era. She did so under the name “Suzanne Valadon”, which she adopted during her relationship with Henri. He nicknamed her Suzanne after the biblical Susannah (featured in the popular painting subject “Susannah and the Elders”) and she decided that she liked it better as a name than Maria.

Suzanne and Henri had an open relationship, something they both took advantage of. Henri slept with his other models, for example, one of whom gave him a “social disease” which was common in Paris at the time: syphilis. Popular legend has it that it was the model of Rosa La Rouge who gave him the disease, though this is complicated by the fact that we don’t know who that model actually was. Henri was impacted enough by the first phase of the disease that he left Paris for the winter to take a holiday for the sake of his health. Once it went into remission he returned, thinking (as so many did) that he was over the worst of the disease.

“At the Moulin Rouge”, painted by Henri around 1892.

1889 was a pivotal year in Henri’s career. A highlight was exhibiting three paintings in the annual Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, the indie alternative to the Academy. These helped to establish his niche as a documentary artist, one who recorded the real lives of the people of Montmartre in stark opposition to the idealised mythical scenes the Academy preferred. The other key event in 1889 was the opening of the most famous nightclub of Montmartre, and in fact maybe the most famous nightclub in history: the Moulin Rouge.

Henri was a regular at the Moulin Rouge right from the opening night. It was there that he invented a cocktail known as “the Earthquake”, a potent blend of cognac and absinthe that shows just how heavy a drinker he had become. It was also where he found new models and inspiration after he and Suzanne broke up in 1890. (There are rumours that she faked a suicide attempt in order to try and get him to marry her, though this might just be slander.) The most steadfast of those was Jane Avril, one of the dancers who popularised the Moulin Rouge’s most famous dance: the can-can. Another can-can dancer was Louise Weber (who used the stage name of La Goulue) and she was the subject of Henri’s venture into a new medium: the printed poster.

Henri’s poster advertising La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge

Henri was a huge fan of Japanese printing techniques, and he was very influenced by them in his own poster making. Unlike the detailed textures of his paintings, the posters use blocks of solid colour but still retain a dynamism and unique character. The most famous of these is his poster advertising Aristide Bruant’s appearance at the Ambassadeurs nightclub, showing his friend in his distinctive red scarf and black slouch hat. [1] But he painted many of them, which were pasted up around the city and gave his art a reach to the common people that salons and exhibitions couldn’t match.

Henri’s iconic poster of Aristide Bruant

Though Henri is best known for his paintings of Montmartre life, he did make one set of paintings in 1891 with a very different subject: surgery. His cousin Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran was a doctor who was studying surgery under Jules-Émile Péan, possibly the greatest surgeon in France at the time. He got permission for Henri to observe the great man at work, which inspired two paintings that had the trademark Toulouse-Lautrec realism. In fact it’s instructional to contast them with Henri Gervex’s painting of Péan. The Lautrec paintings show a man at work, intent on his trade as he operates on his covered patient. Gervex shows Péan orating to a class of students before he begins operating on a (naked and female) patient. One shows reality, the other demonstrates exactly what “art” of the 19th century usually entailed.

Despite his artistic success and his new friends, Henri’s disability still left him feeling an outcast. He was the subject of enough abuse and insults that it drove him deeper into depression and alcoholism. Henri sought solace with fellow outcasts, most notably in 1892 when he moved into a room in a brothel and took up residence with the prostitutes. This wasn’t a sex thing (or at least, not entirely a sex thing). Henri became friendly with them, and his paintings of the women living there combine a genuine affection with his usual realism. To most of society at the time, they were the lowest of the low, “fallen women”. Henri painted them as people.

“In Bed – The Kiss”, painted around 1892.

Henri’s paintings are also notable for documenting another side of Montmartre that is often neglected by historians: lesbianism. France was one of the few countries in Europe that had decriminalised homosexuality in the 19th century, and Paris was one of the few cities where (discreet) same-sex activity was tolerated. [2] Though the residents of the brothels sold their favours to male clients, they often saved their romantic feelings for each other. Those weren’t the only lesbians that Henri knew well, either. His friendship with Jane Avril might have lasted for so long due to a lack of physicality between them; she was also a lesbian who had affairs with her fellow dancer May Milton and with the Irish singer May Belfort (both of whom Lautrec did posters for.) In fact Henri was one of the few men allowed to become a regular at La Souris, the most famous lesbian bar in Montmartre in the early 1890s.

1893 was another good year for Henri professionally. His friend Maurice Joyant organised a retrospective of his work that earned him critical accolades and recognition as one of France’s great painters. Even Edgar Degas, a deeply conservative man who strongly disapproved of Henri’s lifestyle, was forced to admit: “Well, Lautrec, it is clear you are one of us.” Henri also did covers for many of the literary magazines that were being published in Paris at the time, most notably La Revue Blanche which was published by his friends Alexander and Thaddeus Natanson. The fuel for the magazine was a salon hosted by Thaddeus’ wife Misia at which Henri was a regular. He enjoyed acting as barman for her guests, and became an expert at producing perfectly-layered cocktails for them. He was also one of many artists who painted her, including a poster-style drawing for the cover of “La Revue Blanche”.

Henri took a trip to London in 1895 to give moral support at the trial of a man he had met once before and admired, Oscar Wilde. Henri had played host to Oscar during a visit the writer had made to Paris. Despite being stereotypically portrayed as a “starving artist” Henri was one of the better-off people in Montmartre and was well-known as a generous host. He become almost as famous for his cooking as his painting; and his recipes were published by Maurice Joyant after his death as L’Art de la Cuisine. During that trip to London Henri also drew a poster for a British cycling company. He was a huge fan of cycling despite the fact that his disability made it impossible for him to cycle himself; and frequently attended and drew cycling races.

If 1893 was the pinnacle of Henri’s career, 1896 was when he began his steep decline. That was the year he published Elles, a book collecting his drawings of life in the brothel. (”Elles” is a French equivalent of “they” used when the group in question are entirely female.) The book was a commercial failure, largely because Henri’s drawings were almost deliberately unerotic. The French public had no interest in art that showed sex workers as being human. Meanwhile Henri’s prolific production of paintings and posters had slowed drastically as alcoholism began to take its toll on him. His friends did his best to help him cut down on his drinking; for example Thaddeus and Misia Natanson took him to stay in the countryside where they would have no drinks in the house. Unfortunately they didn’t realise that Henri was sneaking out to the local pub.

“The Passenger in Cabin 54”, later used in a poster to advertise the cruise line.

The effects of alcohol on Henri’s immune system allowed the syphilis he had caught years earlier to resume its ravages much sooner than would have usually been the case. With no effective treatment available the best his doctors could do was advise that he go on a cruise in the hope that the “change of air” might help him. During the cruise Henri drew a picture of one of his fellow passengers, a drawing now known as “the passenger in cabin 54”. Legend says that Henri became obsessed with her and stayed on the cruise long past his planned departure port in the hope of getting an introduction, but eventually left the cruise without meeting her properly.

Sadly Henri’s decline continued over the next few years. Whether due to alcoholism, wormwood poisoning (from drinking absinthe), or the neurological effects of the syphilis, he began to hallucinate. He became afraid of flies, and imagined great headless beasts trying to attack him. Things got so bad that a keeper was hired to stay with him so that he would not hurt himself. The keeper couldn’t stop the worst hurt he was doing to himself though: the continued drinking. Henri’s friends tried to keep him busy, and he did continue to paint and draw. All too often though his work during these years never progressed past sketch form.

One of Henri’s “circus drawings”.

In 1899 Henri’s family decided to commit him to a sanitarium. They chose Folie Saint James, a former stately home (set among some famous landscaped gardens) that the original owner had been forced to sell in the financial collapse that preceded the French Revolution. It was a very high-class establishment, catering to the rich elite of Paris. Henri’s health soon began to improve, but soon he was well enough to begin desperately wanting to leave. After a few months he hit on the scheme of drawing to show how well his mental faculties had recovered. Among the works he produced in the hospital was a series of drawings set at a circus, demonstrating his memory and visualisation skills. The doctors were convinced and he was allowed to leave. He was warned however that if he began to drink again then he would collapse into an even worse state.

At first, things seemed to be going well. Henri was painting again, and even experimenting with new techniques and approaches to colour. His friends still worried though, and one thought that Henri “was forcing himself to resemble the old Lautrec.” Henri himself seems to have regarded it as inevitable that he would sooner or later relapse in alcoholism. Six months later, he did. His work began to fall off again, and his health also went into decline. His family cut down his allowance in the hope that this would make him stop drinking, but he stopped eating instead. Naturally this weakened him even further.

One of Henri’s final paintings, drawn in a club charmingly called “La Rat Mort”: “The Dead Rat.”

In March of 1901 Henri lost the use of his legs. This was a sign that the neurosyphilis was in full effect, and the end was near. A few months later he had a stroke. His mother (who he had been estranged from for some time) immediately took him into her home and put him under care. His health improved slightly, but then began to deteriorate. He died in September of 1901, aged only 36 years old. His last words were said when his father, who he had not seen in years, appeared at the deathbed. “Le vieux conf!” – “the old fool!”

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s work was heavily promoted by his mother after his death. Though she had never approved of it while he was alive, she seems to have regarded it as a way to honour his memory after his death. It was thanks to her that the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec was established in Albi where Henri was born. His work hasn’t always been “fashionable”, and some critics even describe the people he drew as “grotesque”. (Some even describe them as “caricatures”, revealing their own ignorance.) His own defence was simple:

One of Henri’s paintings, side by side with a photo of the same couple.

I paint things as they are. I don’t comment. I record.

It’s thanks to that literal attitude, and to his unstinting sympathy with the forgotten people, that Henri’s paintings are not just works of art, but important historical records to help us understand the lives of those in Montmartre. Due to this Henri has become synonymous with and symbolic of the culture he drew, and has been portrayed multiple times in films set during the period. The most notable were the 1952 Moulin Rouge (which portrays the relationship between Henri and Marie Charlet, in highly fictionalised form); and the 2001 Moulin Rouge (where Henri is reduced to the role of comic relief.) Ironically the master of accurate portrayal became best known through inaccurate portrayals. But his true immortality came from his iconic art and posters, which gave us a window into the glorious past of the Golden Age of Montmartre.

[1] Henri’s posters of Aristide were the model for the costume worn by 1920s pulp hero The Shadow.

[2] This was the case for far longer than it should have been, and was why gay and lesbian culture in Europe (like Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon) continued to centre on the city well into the 20th century.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/henri-de-toulouse-lautrec-artist-of-montmartre/feed/0Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Streethttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hetty-green-the-witch-of-wall-street/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hetty-green-the-witch-of-wall-street/#respondMon, 28 Jan 2019 11:56:16 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=73100Hetty Green, America’s richest woman, was born as Henrietta Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1834. Her father Edward owned the biggest whaling company in the city, and New Bedford was at the time the biggest whaling city in America. [1] His grandfather had gotten into the business early, but it was Edward who took […]

]]>Hetty Green, America’s richest woman, was born as Henrietta Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1834. Her father Edward owned the biggest whaling company in the city, and New Bedford was at the time the biggest whaling city in America. [1] His grandfather had gotten into the business early, but it was Edward who took the family to the top spot in the business. Her mother’s father, Gideon Howland, was also extremely well off. Since her mother was often ill and her father was usually absent on business, Hetty (who was an only child) was often left in Gideon’s care. His eyesight was failing in his old age, so from the age of six Hetty would read the financial papers to him and hear his comments on the state of the markets – an early education that saw her in good stead for the rest of her life. By the age of thirteen she was doing the accounts for her family, and though she was a poor student in most other aspects her skill with numbers was undoubted.
Hetty as a young girl.

Hetty’s family were Quakers, and she was raised in that faith’s values of thrift and saving. Her formal education reinforced that, as she attended a boarding school for Quaker girls which catered to both rich and poor girls. The school essentially used the rich girls to subsidise the poor girls, and gave the same care to both in the hope of teaching the rich girls charity and humility. In Hetty’s case they simply taught her that she could get by on little, and thus be left with more.

Hetty was an attractive young woman, and her father was hopeful of getting her a good marriage, so he sent her to stay with a cousin in New York. He gave her a $1200 allowance to allow her to make an impression – but Hetty put $1000 in the bank and got her cousin to help her bargain hunt with the remaining $200. By all accounts she had a good time at the parties and balls of New York, but she failed to make the match her father had been hoping for. In part this was due to the flock of gold diggers her family wealth attracted, and Hetty decided then and there that she wouldn’t marry a man without wealth of his own.

Hetty moved back home, where she became involved in the family business and in acting as a nursemaid to her sick mother. In 1860 her mother died, leaving the bulk of her personal wealth to her husband and a relative pittance to Hetty. Allegedly Hetty considered challenging the will, but decided not to antagonise her father by doing so. This paid off when her mother’s sister Sylvia gave her a gift of twenty thousand dollars, which made her relatively well off. Still, Hetty was deeply alarmed when her father (still relatively young) had somewhat of a mid-life crisis after her mother’s death and moved to New York in 1861 to look for a new wife. She moved with him, in the hopes of derailing any romance. What she wasn’t expecting was to find a romance of her own.

Edward Henry Green was twelve years older than Hetty, but he did meet her criteria of having his own wealth. He came from a family in Vermont with money, and he’d increased his share of it by trading with the Philippines. He met Hetty through her father, as the two firms traded, and the pair struck up a friendship that soon deepened. It’s doubtful whether Hetty ever truly loved him, but she knew that society demanded that she marry and she wasn’t averse to the idea of children. Whether they told her father when they got engaged is unclear, but they hadn’t tied the knot by 1865 when he died. He had never remarried, and his fortune went entirely to Hetty – all five million dollars (in 1865 money) of it. Hetty was now one of the richest women in America.

It’s not surprising that Hetty made her prospective husband sign an agreement renouncing any interest in this fortune if they got married. What did raise eyebrows, though, was her reaction when her aunt Sylvia (the same one who had given her twenty thousand dollars five years earlier) passed away. Sylvia left half of her fortune to charity, and the other half to be held in a trust fund. The income from that trust fund (around sixty five thousand pounds a year) would go to Hetty, but she would not be able to touch the principal. On her death, that principal would then be distributed among the other descendants of Gideon Howland. Few people were surprised by the will – Hetty was definitely Sylvia’s favourite niece, but she’d have known that Sylvia wouldn’t need the money. In addition, leaving half of her fortune to charity was definitely a Quaker thing to do. Much less in the spirit of the faith were Hetty’s actions. In 1866 she sued to have the will set aside.

The official title of the case was “Robinson v Mandell”, with the principals being Hetty Robinson and Sylvia’s executor Thomas Mandell. However it soon gained a more informal title – the “Howland will forgery case”. The will in question was not the one that left half the fortune to charity, but an earlier one that left the entire estate to Hetty free and clear. Though this was an earlier will, the version Hetty presented had a codicil attached that said that this will would overrule any later wills. The legality of that was questionable at best, but it didn’t really matter. Mandell had decided it was a forgery and rejected it, and so Hetty had sued him.

The case didn’t make it to court until 1868, by which time Hetty Robinson had become Hetty Green – she and Edward were married in 1867. The case still bore her maiden name though, based on the original filing. It was notable for being one of the earliest cases to present evidence based on statistical analysis in court. After it had been demonstrated that the signature on the codicil was an exact duplicate of that on the main will, Mandell then called the mathematician Benjamin Peirce who showed the ways in which Sylvia’s signature normally varied meant the the chance of such a match was ridiculously remote.

The court ruled against Hetty, though it wasn’t Peirce’s evidence that was key but rather the fact that she was the sole witness to the signature on the codicil – since she was also the sole beneficiary, this made her witnessing, and the codicil, invalid. Ironically as soon as the case was ended Mandell immediately sent Hetty six hundred thousand dollars – the trust fund had done even better than expected in the previous three years, and with Sylvia’s final will in effect Hetty was entitled to that income. That might have led her cousins to try to have her indicted for forgery based on Peirce’s evidence. Rather than wait and see if they managed to do so, Edward and Hetty Green (who was now pregnant) moved to London.

Hetty’s first child, named Edward after his father (but always called “Ned”) was born in August of 1868. At the time the Greens were living in the Langham hotel, and they were still there three years later when her second child was born. This was a daughter, who without a trace of irony Hetty named Sylvia after her aunt. It was also during those years in London that Hetty made her first major coup.

Almost as soon as receiving her inheritance she had invested heavily in American “greenbacks” – bonds issued by the government to fund post-Civil War reconstruction. Many had balked at trusting the government at the time, but Hetty had bet that they would recover strongly – and it was a bet that added another million dollars to her fortune by the time the Greens returned to America in 1874. Those same investors who had avoided greenbacks had in the meantime invested heavily in railroad bonds, which crashed in 1872 causing three banks to fail. Hetty, of course, was then in a prime position to hover up as many of the crashed stocks as she could. (In the meantime, Edward had served as a director of three London banks – prestigious, but as always nowhere near Hetty’s level.)

As Hetty had alienated her own relatives, the couple decided to return to Edward’s family home in Bellow Falls, Vermont. There Hetty had an entirely new set of relatives to alienate. It was around this time that stories of her eccentricity and stinginess begin, though it’s hard to tell which are real and which are apocryphal. One story, for example, has it that young Ned injured his leg as a child (possibly during a period when he was in New York with Hetty). Rather than take him to the regular doctor, Hetty instead dressed them in old clothes and took them to the free clinic for the poor.

Alternate versions of the story have them recognised there and the doctor refusing to treat them for free, and even have Ned lose his leg after Hetty refuses to pay for treatment. Whether that’s true is hard to pin down, though the injury in question did cause him trouble for years and he did eventually have to have his leg amputated. By that time Hetty was infamous for her miserliness though, so the whole story might have been made up out of whole cloth. Another story is that when Edward’s mother died and Hetty’s house hosted the reception, she used the cheap glassware and not the fine stuff for fear the crowd would chip the expensive crystal – something that Edward was less than pleased about. Hetty was also on poor terms with the servants, who she accused of stealing, and the local shopkeepers, who she accused of cheating her. They in turn were less than complimentary to her.

Hetty and her dog Dewey.

The domestic tension between Edward and Hetty came to a head in 1885, when the financial house John J Cisco and Sons went bankrupt. Hetty was one of the firm’s investors, but it turned out that the single biggest debtor was actually Edward. He had persuaded the firm to loan him money based on the belief that Hetty would underwrite his debts, which she refused to do. From her point of view, their finances were completely separate. (By this time she had a net worth of around $27 million.) Without her bailing him out, Edward was forced to declare bankruptcy. He was deeply embarrassed by this, while Hetty saw his use of her name to shore himself up as a complete betrayal. She was also forced by the bank’s receivers to pay $422,000 to cover Edward’s debts, before they’d let her recover her own investments. The two Greens separated as a result, though they didn’t divorce.

For the next twenty five years, Hetty lived in a succession of rented apartments around New York and New Jersey – possibly due to a fear of assassination, which she was said to have inherited from her father. On one apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey she didn’t have her own name by the bell – instead it had the surname “Dewey”, after her dog. With the fall of Cisco she had transferred most of her assets to Chemical Bank (nowadays JP Morgan Chase), but she had deposits in many banks around New York and would carry her papers to their offices to do her business rather than rent an office of her own.

She still became well-known as the richest woman in the city, and in fact on three separate occasions she gave loans of over a million dollars to the New York municipality to bail it out of financial crisis. Her name became a byword for wealth. In an O. Henry short story, a young woman argues with a proposed amount she pay in rent with “I’m not Hetty, even if I do look green.”

In 1898 Edward’s health began to fail, and Sylvia managed to persuade her mother to reconcile with him. She was by his side during his decline and eventual death in 1902. Following this she wore widow’s black for the rest of her life, and it was these clothes that earned her the nickname “the Witch of Wall Street”. The less charitable claimed that the real reason she wore black was that it required less cleaning than any other colour. Similar rumours claimed that she would only pay to have the hem of her dress cleaned, and that she would wear her clothes until they grew mouldy.

Sylvia and her mother were close, but it was Ned who was her planned successor. He was sent to Texas in 1893 to manage a railway company she had taken over there, which she thought could be a great success if managed properly. He passed this test with flying colours, and stayed in the state to manage her affairs in the south of the country. With the distance between them, he was able to get some measure of freedom and he became known as a much more lavish spender of money than his mother.

Ned was active in the state’s politics and was a friend and partner of William Madison MacDonald, a Republican politician and the state’s first black millionaire. He also became something of a ladies man, and later began a long term relationship with a prostitute named Mabel Harlow, who he met during a business engagement. Of course, he was well aware that Hetty would never allow him to marry her. Sylvia had a much more acceptable taste in partners though. In 1909 she married Matthew Astor Wilks, a member of the prestigious Astor family. This wasn’t until after Hetty had rejected several previous suitors though, and Hetty still made him sign a pre-nuptial agreement.

Hetty Green in 1905.

Hetty decided to bring Ned back to New York in 1910 to help her manage her affairs. He came (after accepting an honorary rank of Colonel from the state) and brought Mabel with him, though he kept her discreetly hidden from his mother. Hetty doubtless knew about her, of course, but the appearance of respectability was probably enough for her. For several years, for example, she had responded to stories of her miserliness by saying that she was simply following good Quaker principles of thrift. The fact that she signally failed to follow their principles of charity was beside the point.

One such story related to a hernia she suffered in her old age, as she only visited the doctor with it once it had progressed to the point where she could no longer walk. On examining her he found that she had secured the bulging protrusion by jamming a stick into her underwear. He told her that she would need surgery, and Hetty (who by this time was worth over a hundred million dollars) was horrified when he told her it would cost $150.

A caricature of Hetty, from a drawing showing America’s richest people.

In 1911 at the age of 78 Hetty converted to the Episcopal faith that Edward had followed, so that she could be buried alongside him. Five years later she suffered a stroke, and after several more she died in July of 1916. It was later claimed that the final attack was brought on by an argument with a servant over the price of skimmed milk. Her fortune (which was somewhere between $100 and $200 million dollars) was equally divided between Sylvia and Ned.

Ned married Mabel, though perhaps in memory of his mother he did make her sign a pre-nuptial agreement. The pair had no children. Ned was much more lavish with his money after his mother’s death, and became known as one of the greatest coin and stamp collectors in America. He was enthusiastic about radio, air travel and motorcars – which he had specially adapted for his use due to his missing leg. In 1924 he paid to have the last surviving ship from Hetty’s father’s whaling fleet taken ashore and exhibited at his estate in Round Hill, Massachussets. This was also where he built his radio towers, and he financed one of the first radio stations in America to broadcast from there.

“Colonel” Ned Green (in 1923).

It was probably due to this spending that when Henry died in 1937 his inheritance of $75-100 million had been reduced to a “mere” $44 million. Due to his prenuptial the vast majority of this went to Sylvia, though Mabel got a half a million of it from the probate court. Sylvia’s husband had died in 1926 and she also had no children, so when she died in 1951 she left her fortune (with the exception of a relatively small bequest to a cousin) to charity. Hetty Green (who, four years later, the Guinness Book of Records would label “History’s Greatest Miser”) would not have approved. Perhaps that’s exactly why Sylvia did it – one final act of revenge against the Witch of Wall Street for ruling her life so harshly.

Images via wikimedia except where stated.This column was originally uploaded on 2nd May 2017.

[1] Nantucket had dominated the trade in earlier years, but as whaling ships grew bigger New Bedford’s larger harbor helped it overtake the smaller city.

[2] Round Hill was donated to MIT, who had been doing research there at Ned’s invitation.

]]>https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/hetty-green-the-witch-of-wall-street/feed/0Joseph Fouché, Villain of the French Revolutionhttps://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/joseph-fouche-villain-french-revolution/
https://www.headstuff.org/culture/history/terrible-people-from-history/joseph-fouche-villain-french-revolution/#respondMon, 21 Jan 2019 11:30:39 +0000https://www.headstuff.org/?p=72625There are always those who see opportunity in chaos. The destruction of the old order leaves gaps that need filling, and “men of vision” see nobody better than themselves to fill those gaps. This does require a certain moral flexibility, of course. A willingness to leave behind your old beliefs and embrace new ones even […]

]]>There are always those who see opportunity in chaos. The destruction of the old order leaves gaps that need filling, and “men of vision” see nobody better than themselves to fill those gaps. This does require a certain moral flexibility, of course. A willingness to leave behind your old beliefs and embrace new ones even more fervently. There were many such men who rose and fell during the French Revolution, but few were as blatant or as successful as Joseph Fouché.

Fouché was born in the tiny village of Le Pellerin in western France in 1759. His father Julien Joseph Fouché was a slave trader who operated out of the nearby port city of Nantes. Fouché senior operated the “triangle trade”, a lucrative practice where slaves were bought in Africa, shipped to America where they were sold and luxury goods like sugar were bought with the profits.

Those were then taken back to Europe where they were sold, and then the ship would load up with trade goods and head down to Africa to repeat the process. This made enough money that Fouché senior was able to buy a slave plantation in Santa Domingo, which gave the family a steady source of income when he died suddenly in 1771.

The cruel slave trade where the Fouche family fortune was made.

Young Joseph Fouché originally hoped to become a trader like his father, but his ill health made that a poor choice. Instead then he became a scholar, studying in Nantes. Like most education at the time, this was provided by the church; in this case an order known as the Oratorians (more formally, the Oratory of Jesus and Mary Immaculate).

Their schools were notable at the time as being deliberately more “modern” than those of the Jesuits, for example. The Oratorians taught in French, not Latin, and their pupils learned European languages in use at the time rather than ancient classical ones. They embraced the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and taught their pupils to do the same.

Fouché showed an aptitude for teaching, and he was sent to Paris for further studies. At the age of 23 he was made a science teacher, and then held several teaching posts around the west of France over the next five or six years. He became a Freemason during this time, and also made the acquaintance of a lawyer and academic in the city of Arras named Maximilien Robespierre.

They bonded over their shared belief in the need for urgent political reform, as the corruption of the nobility and the problem of social inequality was driving France towards an abyss. And then in 1789 a mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, and the dive into that abyss began.

The trial of King Louis XVI in front of the National Assembly.

Due to Fouché’s enthusiastic support of the Revolution, he was moved back to Nantes where the Oratorians hoped the could keep him in check. He wasn’t held back from political involvement though, and became a member of the Jacobin Club. This was effectively a political party (though the idea of political parties had not yet infected western democracy). It held anti-Royalist and anti-clerical views, which Fouché enthusiastically spoke out about.

The population of Nantes loved it. The clerical organisation he was a member of were less sure. They were right to be worried. In the summer of 1792, the monarchy were overthrown and a new democratic assembly was elected. One of the first acts of the French Assembly was to officially dissolve all church organisations within France, including the Oratorians. Since Fouché had never taken any major vows, he was easily able to leave the church when that happened. This was convenient, as he happened to be a member of that very assembly which had just dissolved them. He had stood for election and had won, and so he was now the deputy for the department of Loire-Inférieure. His academic career was over, but his political career had just begun.

Fouché’s previous experience made him a natural fit for the Committee of Public Education, and initially he aligned himself with the Girondin faction of the Jacobins. They were the more dominant faction in the party, so it made sense. Their drive to spread the gospel of the Revolution to other countries also fitted into his own beliefs. However he left them over the same issue that led to them losing their control over the party – the fate of the captive King Louis XVI.

The Girondins had initially opposed overthrowing the king, as they favoured a constitutional monarchy over a republic. After Louis was found guilty by the assembly of treason, they led the call for clemency and that he be imprisoned for life. Fouché believed that the king must die, and so he joined the Montagnard faction in calling for his execution. It was a well-timed switch of allegiances. By the end of the year, the Girondin leadership would suffer the same fate as the king: death at the hands of Madame Guillotine.

The uniform of a Representative On Mission, painted by Jacques-Louis David

War with the rest of Europe had become almost an inevitability, and the death of Louis XVI ensured it. Fouché’s speeches calling for the king’s execution made him infamous abroad, which in turn helped to elevate him within France. While war was being fought on the borders, he was given the task of suppressing internal dissent. Sparked by the regicide, a revolt had broken out in the provinces of La Vendée and Brittany, and he was sent out as a Représentant en mission to deal with the problem.

A representative-on-mission had almost dictatorial powers of life and death. While military forces crushed the rebel armies, Fouché used those powers to execute anyone suspected of harboring rebel sympathies. It was brutal, but it was also efficient. To the movers and shakers of the Republic, Fouché became known as a man willing to do whatever it took to get a job done.

In the autumn of 1793, the man who had taught for a Christian order became one of the leaders of the drive to de-Christianize France. The Republic had initially tolerated Christianity, but their refusal to indulge ancient privileges had led to the Catholic Church finding itself in constant opposition to them. In addition, the rhetoric of the Revolution meant that any failures of the Republic must be due to enemies within it rather than incompetence on the part of its leadership, and Christians made a good choice for those enemies.

Seizing church property was also an easy way to raise funds they desperately needed. So it was made official policy that Christianity was out, replaced with the Cult of Reason. In the name of Reason Fouché destroyed churches, had religious statues and crosses removed wherever they were found, and ordered that all cemeteries bear only a simple inscription above their gates: “Death is an eternal sleep.”

While the Reign of Terror that baptised the Revolution in blood is most often associated with the guillotines of Paris, in fact the majority of its victims came from the executions carried out in the rebellious provinces. One of the most infamous centres of that Terror was Lyon. In August of 1793 it revolted against the Republic. Two months later it was conquered, and the Committee for Public Safety sent two Representatives to make sure it didn’t rebel again. Fouché and his fellow representative-on-mission, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, formed what they called the “Temporary Commission for Republican Supervision”.

They began with a ceremony of Reason to dedicate their “holy mission”, and then they started killing anyone suspected of reactionary sympathies. Fouché had decided that the guillotine was both too slow and lacked sufficient horror, so he came up with a new method that earned him the nickname of the “Musketeer of Lyon”. [1] Those sentenced to death were chained together into groups of a dozen or so that were then blasted repeatedly with grapeshot. Usually this resulted in at least one being left alive mortally wounded and screaming, forcing the soldiers to finish them off with bayonets.

The family of the suspects, including children, were among those executed by this method. After hundreds were killed an official complaint was filed and Fouché was forced to switch to a more normal form of firing squad. In total nearly 2,000 people were executed in Lyon, and Fouché wrote:

Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here.
…
We are causing much impure blood to flow, but it is our duty to do so, it is for humanity’s sake.
…
The blood of criminals fertilises the soil of liberty and establishes power on sure foundations.

The scope of the carnage in Lyon was enough that it even gave Robespierre pause, at least publicly. Fouché was recalled to Paris, where he found that Robespierre had replaced the Cult of Reason with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Rather than being atheistic, this religion venerated an “unknowable godhead”. Fouché publicly mocked the new Cult, a risky business as several of the most prominent architects of the Cult of Reason had been executed for the same reason. When Robespierre tried to expel Fouché from the Jacobin Club (a clear prelude to a trial and executio), Fouché realised that it was Maximilien or him. And he did not intend it to be him.

Robespierre’s ruthlessness and erratic behaviour had already led several to conspire against him, and it was the protection of one of these (Paul Barras) that saved Fouché’s neck for the moment. Fouché in return worked tirelessly to marshal opposition to Robespierre. Rather than being expelled from the Jacobin Club he managed to become its President, which gave him a good platform to sound people out.

Mostly people simply needed to know that others felt the same way, as otherwise everyone was afraid to stick their neck out. Once people knew that the mood was against Robespierre, his fall was almost comically swift. When it became feared that he was about to institute another purge, his ally Louis Antoine St-Just was heckled into silence while giving a speech. The hecklers denounced Robespierre as a traitor and a tyrant, and a vote condemned to arrest. He tried to escape but was captured, tried and executed. With his death, Fouché was saved.

A painting of Joseph Fouché from the Palace of Versailles

Once again, Fouché had the virtues of luck and timing. Many of his fellow representatives-on-mission wound up facing the guillotine for their role in atrocities during the Terror, but he was spared that fate due to his involvement at the heart of the Thermidorian conspiracy. [2] He was arrested, but avoided any trial before the general amnesty that was called after those considered a real risk had been executed. He was too far to the left for the political climate, and found himself left out in the wilderness.

There are some who think this was a ploy though, and that he acted as a spy for the Directorate on these groups. That would explain how he managed to land a lucrative contract to supply the army, which allowed him to build up a sizable personal fortune. It was around this time that he married a woman named Bonne-Jeanne Coiquaud, anad had the first of what would be many children. By 1799 he was considered rehabilitated enough to become Minister of Police in 1799, shortly before the next coup rearranged the fortunes of the French Revolution again.

As Minister of Police Fouché was the one responsible for finally closing down the Jacobin Club, the engine of so much of the Revolution, after it fell afoul of the Directors who ruled France at the time. Officially it had been closed down five years earlier, but the Jacobin partisans hadn’t gone anywhere. The elections of 1799 saw a large number of them voted into the Assembly, where they were soon at odds with the Directorate who held supreme authority.

The new Club du Manege was supposed to act as a rallying point for them, but it proved far too successful for the authorities to ignore. So Fouché broke up the club and arrested all those distributing papers critical of the government. It was clear to him that the Directorate’s days were numbered, though, and he was not a man to bother himself with ideals of loyalty. So he attached himself to the new rising power: an ambitious general named Napoleon Bonaparte.

Joseph Fouche painted by Jean-Baptiste Sambat.

Fouché’s service in Napoleon’s coup on 18 Brumaire was mostly a matter of non-involvement. He ensured that when Napoleon’s men seized power and arrested the two Directors who refused to resign. This put him in Napoleon’s good graces, enough for him to remain on as Minister of Police. It was a trust he soon nearly betrayed, according to stories, in June of 1800.

At the time Napoleon was off in Italy, and word arrived from Marengo that he was in dire straits. A conspiracy soon arose to oust the Bonapartes and take power if Napoleon was defeated. The plot was aborted when word arrived that Napoleon had won the battle, and when he returned to Paris he ordered Fouché to capture the conspirators. This was somewhat awkward for Fouché as he was allegedly the leader of the conspiracy. Luckily there was little to link him to the plot, apart from some papers in the possession of Senator Clement de Ris.

This is the motive that is said to lie behind the mysterious kidnapping of Senator de Ris in September of 1800, so that agents of Fouché could destroy the documents. Three men were later executed for the kidnapping on extremely flimsy evidence, in a scandal that forever soured Fouché in the eyes of the general public.

Fouché proved his value to Napoleon in December of 1800, when his spies within the Royalists drove them to try and assassinate Napoleon. This then allowed the First Consul to crack down on the Royalists (and on the remaining Jacobins) with impunity. Fouché’s attempts to defend the Jacobins lead to a soured relationship between the two men, and he left is post as Minister in 1802.

He maintained a network of spies however, and was instrumental in preventing a plot against Napoleon in 1804 from succeeding. This plot led to the arrest and execution of the popular and well-connected Duc d’Enghien, despite there being nothing connecting him to it. Executing a member of the nobility on such flimsy grounds raised the spectre of the Reign of Terror in the minds of the crowned heads of Europe, and did much to delegitimize Napoleon’s rule in their eyes. It was this action that led to Fouché’s most famous quote:

It is worse than a crime. It is a political error.

Despite this comment, Fouché was once again made Minister for Police later in 1804 after Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France. There were many of the old revolutionaries who rankled at the idea of having an absolute monarch once more, but Fouché was feared enough that conspiracies were few for the first years of Napoleon’s reign. In fact the emperor was more afraid of conspiracies involving his ministers than his people – a rumour that Fouché had been meeting with Talleyrand despite a public enmity between the two was enough to make him turn back from a military campaign in Spain to investigate. He found nothing to the story, which seems to have reaffirmed his trust in Fouché – at least, for the moment.

Joseph Fouché in his ducal regalia.

In 1808 Napoleon recognised Fouché’s service by granting him a title: Duc d’Otrante. Unlike in England (where the title of Duke was and is reserved for relatives of the monarch) in France it could be conveyed on a non-royal; but it still meant a noble of the highest rank. The one-time fanatic of the Revolution who had shed so much blood in its name now held a title only a step below King. It seems only natural that it would start to go to his head, and this was what lead to the real conflict between him and his emperor. While Napoleon was off fighting in Austria, Fouché organised a force to defend Antwerp. The emperor approved of this, but what he approved of less was Fouché’s words in issuing the order:

Let us prove to Europe that although the genius of Napoleon can throw lustre on France, his presence is not necessary to enable us to repulse the enemy.

The problem was that Fouché saw himself as a partner in running the country, but in Napoleon’s eyes he had no partners; only underlings. Fouché might be the most senior of those underlings, but he should remember his place. With that difference in perspective, it was inevitable that Fouché would run into trouble. At the beginning of 1810, for example, Napoleon opened negotiations with the British – only to find that Fouché had already done so on his behalf. As a result, in the summer of 1810 Fouché was once again dismissed from his post as minister and sent to govern Rome on Napoleon’s behalf. When Napoleon found out that Fouché had removed some documents from the minister’s office on leaving, Fouché made preparations to flee to America. Luckily for him Napoleon’s sister Elisa intervened on his behalf, and he was able to make peace with the emperor.

Joseph Fouché as an older man.

Napoleon didn’t want Fouché in France though, so he made him governor of the “Illyrian provinces” (Slovenia, Croatia, parts of Austria and other lands around that area). This was officially a great honor, and in practice a mare’s nest. Fouché did his best to bring his liberal ideals to the area and tried to dismantle the serfdom system, but wound up having to flee as the Austrian army came in and conquered it.

He wound up in Naples, where he started negotiating his passage into a post-Napoleon world. The writing was on the wall, and Joseph Fouché was not a man to let loyalty drag him down. He returned to Paris in time for Napoleon’s abdication, and managed to oversee some of the transition back to royal authority – enough that he avoided prosecution for his part in the Revolution, at least for now.

Fouché was frozen out of the new government, though, and so during the brief “Hundred Days” after Napoleon escaped from Elba and took over the country he became the Minister of Police under Napoleon once again. He played both sides, as always, and was in secret negotiations with the Austrians while he was securing the capital for the Emperor. After Waterloo he acted as an intermediary for those negotiations, hoping to become Prime Minister under the new regime.

Talleyrand outmaneuvered him and took that job so Fouché was once again left with his Minister of Police position. This time he wasn’t just serving it under an autocratic Emperor, though – instead he was serving under a Bourbon monarch, the brother of the man he had argued for the execution of. His flexible morality put survival and holding on to power ahead of all else.

An engraving of Joseph Fouche made two years after his death.

Rightly or wrongly, Fouché took the blame for the reprisals against those who had supported Napoleon’s return to power. He was especially vilified for the execution of Marshall Michel Ney, a man who was considered by many one of the true French heroes. However, his time in power didn’t last long. First he was moved into the position of ambassador to Saxony, and then he found himself made a criminal.

A law passed in January of 1816 granting amnesty to supporters of Napoleon specifically excluded two groups – the Bonaparte family, and those who had voted for the death sentence on Louis XVI. Fouché was forced to go into exile, and took refuge in Trieste in Italy. He died there in 1820, at the age of 61. Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s younger brother, burned his private papers by his request after his death; a job that reportedly took five hours.

Fouché remained a notable figure after his death, and a fake memoir was published in 1824 to try and capitalize on his infamy. His family moved to Sweden, a country well-known for recognising titles of nobility considered to be vacated in their country of origin. There his descendant Charles-Louis Fouché still holds the title. Fouché himself is still alive in the world of fiction, where he has been a villain in novels for the last century or so. A constant presence to enforce the whims of the powerful on the weak in France for twenty of the most tumultuous years in her history; it seems that the perfect opportunist has found himself one last place to hang on after death.

[1] The actual French word used, mitrailleur, is nowadays usually translated as “machine-gunner”. Of course, machine-guns did not exist at the time and it originally described a member of a musket squad trained to fire and reload in alternate rows to allow for rapid fire.

[2] So-called because it took place in the month of Thermidor (June/July) under the revolutionary calendar.